


Salvage

by LadyJanelly



Category: Hockey RPF, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - No Hockey, Amputation, Amputee, Disability-Aware Sex, M/M, Non-Monogamous Society, Original Character(s), Original Culture, Physical Disability, Rebuilding, Recovery, fancasting hockey players as apocalyptic ocs, limb differences, lost boys found, non-fetishized disability, people are not things, rock riders - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-09-21 14:06:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 27
Words: 42,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9552209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: “Witness me.”  The War Boy’s lips are cracked with thirst, the chrome on his mouth long gone grey and dull. His gaze is glassy and unfocused. Brain-damanged or sun-blind, Jame can’t tell. Maybe both. His paint is worn off in patches, the raised patterns of scarring underneath it red with sun’s burn.It has been three days since the Imperator rode through and brought hell down on the Keepers of the Pass. “A few vehicles following” turned out to be the fighting forces of Citadel, Bullet Farm and Gastown combined. Far more than the rock-fall could stop. More than she negotiated for. A hundred warriors running un-tolled through the canyon. Most of a day of quiet, and then the frecking War Rig had roared back through, bringing the pursuit with her, all of it finally wrecking at the arch, man and machine crashed to pieces against the rock, against each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chinibean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chinibean/gifts).



> For chinibean, who asked for "Tyler the war boy - fury road au" 
> 
> Total fan-cast original fic type stuff. Nothing to do with any kind of hockey.
> 
> Warnings. So many warnings. See notes at the end if you want spoilers. I'm trying to put all of them in that I can think of, but let me know if I missed some.
> 
> I do not have an amputation beta for this, so if I've presented anything in a way that feels offensive, please let me know. I have researched modern amputation recovery and WWI prosthetics and adapted/imagined for a Mad Max world setting and tried to at least meet that low bar of medical plausibility. Again, if you have anything to add or if I'm missing something, please leave a comment or send me an ask on Tumblr.

“Witness me.” The War Boy’s lips are cracked with thirst, the chrome on his mouth long gone grey and dull. His gaze is glassy and unfocused. Brain-damanged or sun-blind, Jame can’t tell. Maybe both. His paint is worn off in patches, the raised patterns of scarring underneath it red with sun’s burn. 

It has been three days since the Imperator rode through and brought hell down on the Keepers of the Pass. “A few vehicles following” turned out to be the fighting forces of Citadel, Bullet Farm and Gastown combined. Far more than the rock-fall could stop. More than she negotiated for. A hundred warriors running un-tolled through the canyon. Most of a day of quiet, and then the frecking War Rig had roared back through, bringing the pursuit with her, all of it finally wrecking at the arch, man and machine crashed to pieces against the rock, against each other.

Jame and Jor and the last of the pass’s fighters had harried the straggling soldiers out into the desert, riding shortcuts across the ridges and ambushing the same vehicles over and over, desperate not to show how few they were. If the passes looked weak, if they let these trespassers off without devastating them, it would be a short time before someone else came and challenged the tolls, challenged the now-fragile might of the keepers. 

After that came two days of Jame and Jor scraping the broken, burnt bodies of their people from the rocks, carrying the few who still breathed over stone and sand, deep into the caves and tunnels to the bonesmith. Only when all had been accounted for had they turned their efforts to salvage, to untangling the vehicles piled up behind the War Rig, to securing the canyon until they can guard it proper again.

Jame has no mercy left for the Immortan’s Boys, and he puts the tip of his pry-bar against the soft skin under the Boy’s chin, considers where in the twisted metal wreckage he can brace his feet and lean in without falling. A quick death is more than the lancer deserves, the most Jame is capable of giving. The boy grabs the bare metal in his hands, tries to push it off of him, panting and wheezing, animal-wild in the last seconds of his life. 

“Wait.” Jor looks down at where the War Boy gasps and struggles, Jame’s weight not even on him yet, the bar itself more than he can fight. “He past fixing?”

Jame frowns, because the wealth of Immortan Joe’s army is here. There will be no ransom, no pay to give this broken scrap back alive. 

“Barter Town’s always lookin’ for pig farmers,” Jor says, and Jame frowns. Their people buy sometimes. Children mostly. Women with a clear unhappiness at the menfolk who’ve got them. The Keepers take them as trade for the cost of passage, if their own folk don’t count them as valuable enough not to sell. Fold them into their numbers and make them tribe, family. They never sell, though. Never give their own to the caravans. 

They’ve never lost half their fighting force in one day before, either. Never burned through so much fuel or so many drop-bombs. The vehicles they might reclaim from the invaders are not meant for the mountains—too wide, thick, heavy. 

“How many?” Jame asks the War Boy, moves the point of his pry bar to just under the boy’s collar-bone, lets the weight settle again.

“Come again?” The boys asks, blood-cracked hands on the hard iron. “I don’t copy.”

“How many of us did you kill?” Jame asks, and the Boy shakes his head, face twisting in despair.

“None. None. The gates. Closed on me. Junk. Nuthin’ but junk.”

Jame grits his teeth, pulls the bar back. The skin bared by the scraped-off warpaint is pink, raw and naked looking.

“Let’s see what we can salvage,” he says.


	2. Chapter 2

Tye lives. In the wreck and tangle, in the corpse of all he’s ever known. The stink of dead War Boys and the hot-oil stench of trashed engines burn thick in his nose. The sun fangs down on him more than half the day, and the coming of night is aching cold through the bones of him. He shifts around again, even though he’s tried every damn way to lever out of his trap, to get even a cent of movement out of the chassis that pins him down. His right leg’s caught, and he can’t see, but he feels it bleedin’ when he moves too much. It hurts cold like losing, like falling. It punches him up in his guts near to pukin’ when he tries to pull himself out. Makes him wonder if he broke his skull too, the sick ache of it. He’s dyin’. Dyin’ soft, and nobody’ll know; nobody’ll see. Unwitnessed. Unwelcomed. 

He’s not sure how many days it’s been before the rock-riders find him. Big men in their masks and leathers. He hasn’t been able to get his hands on a weapon, and there’s nothing left of him fit to fight them. Nothing to deserve a good death. He begs anyway, useless broken thing he is. The world sliding around Tye so bad he can barely tell which way to push the spear away from his neck and the rock-rider’s eyes hid behind the dirt and glass of his goggles. He begs for a fight, for a death, for a chance of these men _remembering_ him, at least for a couple hundred-days. For a chance to leave a _mark_ that he’s been on this world. That he’d lived.

They don’t laugh, which is more than a smear like Tye could expect. They don’t laugh but they don’t fight him neither. They’re talkin’. The big one saying Barter Town, and the bigger one growling questions at Tye, asking his trophy count, and Tye’s too flaked to lie. 

They talk on some more, and then Big comes and brings Tye a leather bag with water in it, warm and tasting of hide, but Tye drinks it anyway, gulping it down until it’s taken away again. They work, low gruff voices givin’ each other direction or arguin’ over the next move. It’s most of a day’s work. They get all the loose parts off, lever the weight around and block it off with rocks. Bigger gets his pry bar in by Tye’s leg and heaves, and Big is there, grabbin’ Tye under the armpits and draggin’ him back. 

Tye hadn’t screamed when he got his works cut into his chest, marks on his face and lips, arms and back. He hadn’t made a sound, and he doesn’t make a sound now. He feels his eyes rolling back up in his head but doesn’t let himself get gone. Holds onto the here and grits his teeth and breathes through his nose.

Big drops him and he writhes against the hurt of it, mouth open and eyes closed. He holds his knee with both hands, tries to keep that leg from moving a cent but it hurts all the way through him. 

“Fuckin’ waste,” Big says, “Barter Town ain’t buyin’ a shit-farmer with one foot.”

Tye curls up, knows not even the Organic Mechanic could put this right again. Not after days laying under a car. His boot’s twisted and crushed. A wheeze comes out of his chest, high and tight and he never made a sound when he got marked with the signs of the V8, but he makes a sound now. 

“I didn’t work half a day for nothing,” Bigger argues. He crouches down, puts his knee on the inside of Tye’s and holds him down while he slits the laces off of his boot, ignores Tye’s whimpers as he cuts the leather away and the one short scream as he yanks it off. He stares for a second, and Tye can’t see what he sees, can’t see nothing but the man’s broad back. “Tie it off,” he finally says. “It’s just poisoning him and the bonesmith’ll have to take it anyway.” 

“No!” Tye argues, tries to struggle and kick, but Big pulls a belt off of his jacket and wraps it around Tye’s leg just under the knee, puts a spanner through it and cranks it tight. A War Boy with trophies, a War Boy with glory, he might get a Blackthumb to make him new parts. Couldn’t drive. But he could find a good death. Useless half-life shlanger like Tye, he’ll end up Wretched, rusting away and dying ugly. 

“You’ll die when I say you can die,” Bigger says, and Tye shudders as they load him in the side-car of one of their bikes. The engine starts, rumbling and shaking and he loses his hold on the world then, slides down into the dark where nothing hurts.


	3. Chapter 3

The world stops shaking and Tye tries to grab on to the quiet, pulls himself back into his eyes and pries them open. The bikes are stopped, the one he’s slung in the side-car of and the other one. There’s a broken ceiling over him, spots of sun cutting through the jagged, pitted rock. People, gathering around.

“Not one of ours,” someone says, and another person starts keening, high and hurt and Tye wants to beg for somebody to shut them the feck up. Voices raise, angry, and someone else says “Claiming him as salvage! Ours by right!” and he thinks it was one of the men who brought him.

“Not much use if that green foot don’t get cut off,” a calmer voice interjects. “Lemme do my work and y’all fight over him if he lives.”

Strong arms reach under Tye’s shoulders, and he catches a glimpse of a stubbled jaw, sad mouth, serious eyes, shoulder-length dark hair. Then another man grabs him around his knees and he can’t think of much besides the hurt of it as they carry him up to a brighter pocket in the rocks, a place the sun comes down on more than not. There’s a bed of sand there, and they put him down. A block of wood is put under his leg and he struggles with new strength, desperate and afraid. They hold him down, force a strip of heavy leather between his teeth. 

He fights and loses. Loses himself to the bright cut of the knife, the grind of the saw and wakes up again when it’s darker, the afternoon shadows crossing the entire room he’s in. He’s tied, his arms crossed in front of him and a rope across his back keeping them there, looped through his belt in the back to keep him from lifting them over his head. His foot aches, bone-deep, and his heart pounds. 

He thought. He thought they were taking his leg, and his leg _hurts_. He squirms around, trying to get eyes on it, to be sure, to know. He twists, can’t see. Thinks. Thinks if he could move a little more, get the right angle, it would be there. It should be there.

A woman comes in, smooth skin the color of rust, hair like tiny coiled steel springs. Hard eyes. Tye cowers back as best he can, but the thud of his leg against the ground jags through him from toes to hip and he can’t see for the pain, can’t breathe. 

“Hey now, none a that,” the woman scolds him. Comes up on him while Tye’s still trying to sell his body the idea that he’s not dying from the sharp pain. She’s got another of those leather water-bags and Tye’s mouth still tastes of the last one but he drinks. Gotta get strong. Gotta get tough. And then. He thinks on a bit while the woman talks, about how busted up his foot was, how there was no chance of saving it. Even in the before-time, they’d have had to cut it off, two days crushed and open. Green-sick and beyond salvaging. 

Tye thinks on it, and drinks their water and eats a little mash they feed him, sour and white. If they’re feeding him up and giving him Aqua-Cola, then he’ll take it. Get hands on a weapon of some kind. He doesn’t think he can win, one-legged and busted up, but he’ll give them a fight, those big guys that dragged him here. Kill one of them if he’s lucky. It won’t be a Witnessing, but it’ll be something these folk will talk about. Something they’ll hold onto. They’ll think of him anytime they plan on turning a War Boy to a pit-farmer. 

It won’t be a death worth anything, but at least he won’t go soft. Won’t go quiet. 

==============

Jor and Jame stay until the foot’s off and Nianne doesn’t need them to hold the War Boy down anymore. There’s still enough daylight left to get back out to the site of the crash, start shoring up the defenses for when the gangs on the west (Gastown, Bullet Farm, Citadel) get their wheels under themselves again and go looking for easy targets. There are folk, who were coming in as Jame and Jor were heading out with the salvaged boy, working already. They know there are folk on the other end of the pass too, cleaning up and grabbing what they can, making it look normal when the caravans from Bartertown come through.

“We find another one breathing, you gonna dig him out and take him home too?” Jor asks as they park the bikes, eyes checking with the lookout high on the ridge to make sure there’s no immediate danger.

Jame shakes his head, unhappy with the mask that hides his brother’s face from him. He’s not sure if it was just a question, or a loaded one. They get a few hours work in, moving cars. The tractor’s on its way from the living places, but it’ll be the next day before it comes up. They stick with the lighter jobs, popping hoods and scavenging precious hoses and tubing, delicate rubber. Siphoning off fuel into portable tanks. 

Jame has another pang for those three thousand gallons of gas the Imperator promised, blowed up and wasted. The keepers had needed the fuel desperately, to keep the water pumps churning, to keep the people and goats from going thirsty, to keep the gardens green. They needed fuel to keep the bikes running, to defend their land, to take their tolls, to get the supplements to their food and gear they needed. Those three thousand gallons were supposed to keep them supplied while trade was disrupted, while the passes were shaken. Now every drop keeps them that bit further from hard choices, from getting overtaken by raiders or Spikers or wild men from the wastes. 

Jor doesn’t talk about anything but where to build obstacles, what to take from broken vehicles, when to take water breaks, until after the sun’s too low to work by, and they light a tiny fire of sage brush and put their pot over it, take their masks off and stretch out. The others join them there, Gia and Re-Tom, Rad and Roc, laying out bed-spots around the little hearth. It’s a pitiful crowd, and still stronger than at the other end of the canyon. Too few, too thin. Nobody coming to replace them. He doesn’t know how they’re going to do it, to look like more, if someone challenges their control of the pass. To not look weak.

Jame stretches out on his mat and closes his eyes, Jor within reach of his fingertips, if he reached out. Re-Tom has first watch, sitting up where the fire won’t glare his night-vision. 

“Any idea why ya did it?” Jor asks in the quiet. Jame isn’t sure if the others are listening. “Why ya scavenged that boy once we knew he was busted up?”

Jame takes two slow breaths. He’s been puzzling over it all day, but still needs the moment to put it to words.

“I never seen them up close before,” he says at last. “Never saw them scared before. Didn’t think they’d feel it like people do, y’know?”

It’s a soft thought. Jame tries to be strong. Tries to be hard because his people need him to be. Soft thoughts are the reason he’s not war-leader, even if he is the best rider, the best fighter.

“Yeah,” Jor whispers in the dark. “Me neither.”

===============


	4. Chapter 4

Tye wakes to pain and fever. His arms are free, because he’s too weak, too sick to make trouble. The Organic Mechanic here gives him water and more of the white stuff, soft offers turning to hard orders when he tries to refuse her. He drinks, and pisses himself. Throws up more than it seems he’s eaten since the crash. They clean him up and he starts the cycle all over again.

He wakes, once, lucid in the night and there’s a pup standing over him, knife bright in their hand, hate in those brown eyes. Tye stares, can’t look away if this is his death come to him on little feet. He’s so weak he can barely raise his hand. 

The young’un glares, still and watching for so long Tye wonders if he’s dreaming. Finally spits at Tye and then turns, runs away and leaves him alone in the dark, trying to reckon if that wouldn’t have been better. To die quick and easy, even if he’s unremembered. 

===========

Jame works. Sweat running down between his skin and leathers, baking inside his helmet. A group of Spikers roar along the horizon on the sixth day since the crash, and the Keepers take to their bikes, criss-crossing back and forth over the top of the ridges on each side of the canyon. If the Buzzards come in, with their spiked and armored vehicles, Jame isn’t sure they can keep them out. 

The Spikers circle and head back the way they came, but they won’t stay away forever if they think the pass is weak. Jame and Jor and the others double up their efforts, use the tractor to push and pull the biggest pieces of the wreck into a narrow maze, make haphazard-looking piles out of the wreck and rig the foundations so they can rip them out and send the whole thing collapsing down into the pass if they need to. 

They move bodies, more dead people than Jame knew there were left in the world. Men and a few women. They strip them of the most useful items and prop the corpses along the ridges to dry in the sun, high enough up on the hills that it’ll be hard for invaders to tell living Keepers from dead Polecats. The whole valley reeks and Jame wonders if they can smell it in the safe places, if the children have to smell this, and their people who aren’t riders. 

It’s hard work, even by the standards of a hard world, a hard life. Jame aches at night when the blessed darkness ends the day’s labors. Every couple days, a runner goes to where the people live and comes back with a load of food, goat’s milk, dried meat, grain, water, sharpened tools and whatever new gear they’d asked for. The salvage crew uses the fuel from the Citadel’s tanks, run their bikes as little as possible to make it last.

He forgets about the broken boy they brought back, lost in a haze of work and sun and sand. 

“Nianne says your salvage ain’t like to make it,” the runner tells him the second time one is out. “Fever’s burnin’ him out. Doin’ what she can, an he’s still fighting, but.”

Jame grunts, nods. If there’s nothing the bonesmith can do there, there’s less he can do from here. 

A couple trips pass. Jame loses track of the days. Somewhere between ten and twenty his mind tells him. His body says he’s been out here forever, filthy and aching. It feels like this is all he’s ever known, like this is the rest of his life, endless days trying to do too much work with too few fit bodies.

“He’s talking,” the runner says, a skinny kid still a thousand days off of being able to ride and fight. Jame guzzles down some of the water he brought. They’re drinking more than they’d accounted for, working so hard, normal rations feeling like they’re half, and the resupply bike is carrying extra now. Still, it tastes better, fresh from the well. Jame looks at him blank and wipes his mouth. 

“Your boy,” Ko explains. “He’s talking. Fever’s gone down and he got tired of trying to kill us with his eyes.”

Jame snorts. Folk they trade for aren’t usually easy at the start. He’s not sure why he thought a stolen War Boy would be any different.

“Says his name’s Tye,” Ko tells him, and that’s all the news Jame gets that trip.

============

Tye wakes in the night and the pup, the ‘kid’ the people here call them, is standing a few feet off again, that long knife held in two hands. 

Tye smiles, slow and a little mean. “That for me?” he asks, shifts his weight on the rag-covered sand under him. Props himself up on his elbow. His hair is growing in, itchy and dark. They took his paint off, left him naked to the sun if he tried to run off. Or crawl. He feels like he’s losing the boy he was. Like he’s lost all the shelter the Citadel gave him growing up. Like he’s got nobody to guide him to a historic death so he has to muddle through and find one on his own. He needs a weapon for his plan, and the bonesmith has been too careful with hers.

The pup’s lips press tight together, and they take a light step closer, gathering courage.

“You killed her,” the pup whispers, and Tye cocks his head. 

“Oh yeah,” Tye grins, scarred lips stretching wide. “Yeah, I did. Liked it too.” He has no idea who or what the kid is seeing. Doesn’t much care. Just needs them to come in tight. 

The pup blinks, wasted water gathering at the corners of their eyes. 

“You gonna cut me? For killin’ her? For blowin’ her up?” Tye taunts, waiting, ready. 

The kid takes three growling breaths, working themself up to the deed. On the third they surge forward, and Tye is ready, grabbing their arm and redirecting the blade that’s coming down at his chest, driving it harmlessly through the bedding and into the sand below, all the way to the hilt. He keeps his hold on the kid’s wiry wrist and grabs on to the kid’s belt, drags the kid down against his chest, hand over their mouth so they can’t scream.

“Jame gonna like it?” he hisses in their ear, “You tryin’ to take what’s his? Kill me when I ain’t yours?” 

The kid squirms and bites but Tye holds on tight. The foot that isn’t there aches and he’s not got enough spark to fight much longer, even against an opponent so tiny.

“I’m gonna make you a deal,” he promises, and the kid stops fighting quite so hard. “You don’t say nuthin’ and I won’t say nuthin’ and nobody ever knows you tried to end me. Yeah?”

The kid nods, and Tye slowly lets them go. They squirm out of his grip and kick him in the guts in their haste to get away, running off around the bend. 

And when they’re gone, Tye pulls the knife out of the sand, checks the point and the edge for damage. Finds it sharp and fine as anything he could have hoped for. He smiles, and tucks it under him. He’s only seen their soft people, breeders and bonesmith, men too old for war and pups too small. All the Riders are off elsewhere, and Tye too weak still to kill one, even if they were around. 

Soon though. Soon he’ll get the best death he can make for himself.


	5. Chapter 5

“Reckon you’re safe from outside infection,” the bonesmith says as she examines Tye’s leg. He’s got no idea how many days he’s been here. The skin has healed over the end though, still pink and raw and sore, but all closed up now. No way for dirt to get into the meat of him and make him sick all over again. 

“You gotta handle it much as you can,” she says, “rub it, push on it. Gentle to start. We’ll rig you up something later.”

They move him, out of the repair bay and into the places where their folk sleep, a big sand-bottomed cut in the rocks. It’s the same kind of rock as the Citadel, the channel narrower at the top than the bottom, a sliver of sky open over a wider track, maybe twenty paces wide and winding. There are spaces marked out by lines of boxes and gear, hollows in the sand inside lined with rags or leather for sleeping in. He didn’t pay much attention to the Wretched at the Citadel, but this seems better than they had; folks here not carryin’ everything they got on their backs for fear of losing it. Some of the piles are bigger. Cleaner. There’s probably a way up, to better places, but he hasn’t seen it. Somewhere else their bosses and big-bosses sleep. Probably got their prize breeders there, just like The Immortan. 

A fence cuts off one of the offshoots he goes past, leaning heavy on the crutch they gave him. Just a thigh-high tangle of wires and rusted vehicle parts, too low to keep a person from climbing over. There’s a smell. Not bad, just new, and he doesn’t know what to make of it.

The spot they give Tye is beside one of their oldsters, wrinkled face and gnarled hands. He’d never known a person could be so old, he thinks as he watches her unraveling some kind of heavy mesh of a shirt. 

“C’mere, boy,” she calls to him when she catches him staring. He hesitates, and then scoots over on three limbs, holding his bad leg up off the ground. She tells him her name is Lenora. She points where she wants him to sit, and then takes his hands, arranges them so his elbows are at his sides, his hands out in front of him. She slips one end of the long string between his thumb and hand, and then starts winding it around, from one hand to the other, fussing if he lets the strands hang limp. Whenever she gets to a break in the line she carefully ties another one on, snips the ends with the tiniest pair of cutters he’s ever seen.

He rests when she’s done, tired just from sitting up, watching Lenora’s silent work.

When he wakes again, there’s food and water beside him. He eats, and drinks. Feels guilty to waste it, him already plannin’ his death and all.

One of the older men brings over a pair of bowls and sits beside him. One is full of some kind of green-grown things, slender and knobby and the other is empty. The man shows Tye how to split the things (pease, they’re called) and get the good nubs out, put the shells into the empty bowl for the goats later. 

Tye works. It ain’t tweaking a vehicle, or building lances, but he hadn’t realized how bad it was aching his head to have his hands empty and still when he’s still breathing.

A bike rumbles at the end away from the fence; a big man in leathers parks it just inside the canyon’s shade. 

Tye watches, thinks of his blade, hidden in the bedding he brought from the people-shop. 

“Raig,” the old man says, quiet, just for Tye. “Was workin’ the east end. With Griss dead, he’s thinkin’ he’ll be War-leader now. Come to talk to Lenora on it like it’s camp-leader’s say who heads up the fighters.”

It doesn’t make much sense to Tye, how it ain’t just whoever’s most chrome, most tough, being the one in charge, but he’s not wasting too much spark on it. Too busy watching this Raig and counting how many times he’d have to hop one-legged to get close enough to stick a knife in him. A future war-leaders sounds like a big enough kill to get him remembered a little bit. The guy ain’t coming any closer though. It’s too far, and he pictures himself flapping across the sand, falling mediocre on his own blade and the only thing left of him is them laughing while he bleeds out. 

Tye shells pease, and he waits. 

 

============

Jame is working when the bikes come from home-camp. Not the supply runner. Not movin’ fast like there’s an emergency. The defenses are just about as solid as they can be made, so he’s glad of the chance to come in out of sun, to lean in the shadow of the rig that had started the crash and watch. They ride in, smooth heavy cruising bikes, only good for the valley floor. He smiles when he sees Lenora’s mask, heavy tusks and chains riveted on as armor over her shoulders. 

He pushes off the rig, nods his respect for her. The other rider, Kell, parks his bike and heads for where the tractor rumbles, still moving a few pieces of the new defenses. 

“What’s news?” Jame asks Lenora, and she unbuckles the mouth-cover of her mask, takes a sip from her water bag. 

“Raig. In the camp and making trouble.”

Jame frowns. “Trouble over what?” The only reason Raig would have to be troublesome would be if he was getting outvoted for war-leader. Jame tries to think of the riders still able to take the jumps, throw a bomb. None are as tough, as strong as Raig. 

Lenora glances around Jame’s shoulder and Jame follows her gaze. Sees Kell looking at them from where he’s talking to the others.

“You ought to come back,” Lenora says, and Jame feels guilty, being the first to turn towards home, the first to leave the wreck, but Lenora wouldn’t ask light, and if she needs him, if Raig is being more bake-brained than usual, he’ll go.

=============

Jame and Jor pack another load of prime salvage on their bikes and follow Lenora back to the camp. Kell’s not war-ready, but he can stand watches and move rocks as well as either of them. 

There’s no talk on the way back; the rumble of engines would drown it out. They get back in, and Lenora tells them to clean up and meet her back at her patch. They head up to where the water for the goats comes out of the pipe, and one of the kids meets them there with clean wear from their spots. 

The water is cool, and Jame uses handfuls of wet sand to scour thirty eight days of sweat and grease and grime and blood off of his skin. Clean has never in his life felt so much a blessing. 

They take turns, him and Jor, with a sharp blade, shaving each other’s jaws, taking the hair off the sides of their heads, leaving the top and the back long and wet and dark. 

Jame leads the way, back to Lenora’s. Turns the curve and there are definitely more people hanging around her than seems normal. Watching, like there is big news coming up. 

Somebody moves on the patch next to Lenora’s, bare-chest scar-covered, short dark hair. The war-boy, Tye, looks like he’s healed up alright. Skin on his face smooth where it’s not scarred, the sun marks gone. There’s still a feral tension to him, like he’s expecting somebody to stick a knife in him if he don’t watch well enough. His eyes are tracking Jame, and it’s not like Jame owns him, but he feels responsible, to put the boy to ease if he can.

“Hey,” he says, and crouches down so the boy doesn’t have to try to stand up on the crutch Jame sees tucked into his nest. 

A sudden tension in Tye’s face is his only warning, eyes narrowing as the boy’s arm lashes out, a flash of steel in his hand. Jame jerks back, feels the crack of metal against the bone of his jaw. Bright like a gunshot. He grabs for the knife, catches a shallow cut across the meat of his palm but it isn’t deep enough to keep him from catching hold, slick and hot to Tye’s wrist.

Folk are yelling, somebody screaming, but Tye almost silent as they struggle, grunting and panting, Jame’s blood dripping on his chest as he gets the wiry boy under him, wraps his hands around his throat. Tye claws at him, frantic, and Jame relinquishes the choke in favor of pinning his wrists. The boy bucks, but Jame has him, caught under his greater weight, knees on either side of his hips. 

“What the fecking hell?” Jame expects him to flinch, but he snaps his head up, trying to butt Jame in the face. His eyes are wild, teeth gritted, defiant.

“It was mine!” Tye shouts back at him. “You can’t do this to me! You can’t take it from me! Make me die soft. Make me die like this!”

Some of the fight goes out of Jame, but he knows better than to let a man up who is this far tharn. 

“There was no savin’ it,” Jame tells him, regretful. Surely Nianne told him. Surely he knows. “That foot would a killed you. Nobody’s killin’ you here. You’re safe here.”

Tye shakes his head, like he’s too wracked for words, redoubles his efforts at getting Jame off of him. Smeared with Jame’s blood, spitting and yelling.

“Not the fecking foot! My death! You took my death from me! My chance to die historic. To be remembered! I live! I die! I live again!”

Anger catches light in Jame’s chest, burns hot and fast. He lets go of Tye’s wrist for long enough to snap a hard, open-handed hit across the side of his face. Tye gapes, stunned at the blow, and Jame can get a word in. 

“There ain’t no historic in dying! No remembering. The dead is dead. I been haulin’ your dead for thirty-eight days and I can tell you. I can tell you that there’s no livin’ again. No bright tomorrow. Dead is dead and no use to nobody. I hauled thirty eight days of your dead, and they ain’t got no names. They ain’t livin’ again and some of them died a hell of a lot better than you could ever hope to.”

He lets go of Tye’s wrists and grabs his skull between his hands. Wants to crush his brains but settles for shaking him. “I tell you dyin’ ain’t nothin’. A baby two hours in the world can do it. And old folk who forget to breathe in the night. Riders with a wound that goes wrong, or a kid that falls in a crack in the rocks. You think a flash death at the end of a blade matters more than a woman bleeding out in the birthing bed? You think anybody gives a feck, on this side of the night or the other?”

His blood drips down on Tye’s shoulder, a steady drip drip that Jame can hear over his own heavy breathing.

“You wanna die? Huh? Nearest sand is that way.” He nods over his shoulder. 

Tye’s face is turning red, the scars at lips and cheeks flushed dark. He pushes up with his good leg, squirms like he’s trying to worm his way out from under Jame.

Jame dares to glance around, sees the folk circling them. Jor and Raig close-by in case this boy manages to get past Jame. And past them, Lenora. Wiry and lean and old as the pass.

“Look!” Jame says to Tye. Turns his head so he can’t not-see. “Look at her. Twenty-five thousand days old. One of the first riders. Birthed three children, born and lived and died in this world. Figured out the makin’ of the bombs we throw. War leader for two thousand of her days, and camp leader for another six. Negotiator of the first tolls, maker of our peace.”

Lenora quirks a smile, shakes her head like none of it was much worth telling.

Jame loosens his hold, and the boy doesn’t strike out again, shaking under him, face twisting, falling apart. Water coming from his eyes, spilling down his cheeks.

“I don’t know how,” he chokes. Gasps and shudders. “Don’t know how to do it. Livin’ historic.” 

“We’ll teach you,” Jame promises. Climbs off of him and sits on his ass in Tye’s nest. Jor passes him a rag and he presses it under his jaw. He thinks he lost a chunk of bone. Needs to get it cleaned up and let Nianne put some stitches in it. The slice across his palm too, probably. He pats Tye with his other hand, leaving dark smudges across his scarred-up shoulders. People start drifting back, giving quiet, privacy. 

Raig catches Jame’s eye before he goes. Sneers and juts his chin up, like he’s won something here.


	6. Chapter 6

Tye curls up, unable to open his eyes, the gears of his world broke to pieces and rusted to dust. Jame’s hand on his shoulder is the only thing grounding him. Keeping his mind from driving off into a storm.

Dying is nothing. A lie. A broken promise. He heard in Jame’s voice how hard he leans on that being true. If dying is nothing, then there’s no Valhalla. No gates, no welcome. Not just for Tye, but for everybody he ever knew. All those Boys, lost and gone and forgotten. Thirty days or more, he’s been tryin’ to get back to them. To join them in the great forever that ain’t even there. 

Jame pats Tye’s shoulder one last time and then the other rider pulls him up to his feet. “Stay with him, Jor,” Jame murmurs, and Tye feels a wave of guilt, that he tried to kill the man just to pave his way to an afterlife that ain’t real. 

Jor settles in the spot Jame had been in, but his hand doesn’t come to Tye’s shoulder. 

“You get to do that once,” Jor says, low and serious. “You raise hand to anybody else in these rocks without a damn good reason and I’ll run you into the wastes myself.”

Tye nods, gets a hold of his breathing. “I won’t,” he promises, and when he looks up, Jor is looking down, watching him like he’s some kind of lizard the man’s never seen before. 

“Wait here,” Jor says, and goes down a few camps, comes back with a roll of something flat and hard, a tape with marks on it and a scratch of charcoal. “Lemme see your leg,” he says as he sets down again, and Tye isn’t sure he can say no, so he does. 

Jor’s touch is firm but not rough handling as he rolls Tye’s pants leg up, baring the end of his leg, scarred and twisted. There’s no pity in his eyes, no scorn. He takes careful measures of the width and length, both down from the knee and up from it. Marks out his notes on the hard leather. Doesn’t talk a word that ain’t “move here” and “how’s this feel?” and Tye is honest grateful for the quiet to get his head back where he needs it to be. 

Somebody walks on past their spot, covered in thin pale cloth head to toe like a haunt. Tye wide-eye watches them go by, can’t tell man or woman, can’t see by their walk if they’re war-folk or camp. Jor ignores them like he doesn’t see, even though he’s facing them when they pass.

Jor turns him this way and that, getting some marks on the length of the other leg too. While he’s working, Tye searches, sneaky as he can, around in the bedding for his blade, but it’s gone. He feels like a pup again, weaponless and trusting boys bigger and stronger than him to watch and keep him safe.

Jor is done measuring Tye and is working on marking the roll of hard leather, about the time Jame comes back. His neck is cleaned up of the blood, but there’s still stains, black down the rock brown of his shirt. His jaw is purpling where the knife chopped into it, the cut itself criss-crossed with black threads holding it closed. His left hand is bandaged and wrapped up in a fist. Tye thinks that don’t look right to his eyes, but what the hell does he know. 

Jor frowns at it too, though, so maybe Tye ain’t brick-headed.

“That hand’s gonna heal short, she leaves it wrapped that way,” Jor says.

Jame shrugs, looking like he can’t see the right of it either. “Says it’s just like this for a day or two.” 

Jor’s mouth goes flat, and he nods.

Jame crouches down, looks over the work Jor’s doing on the leather. “Bracin’ on the thigh to keep some of the weight off the end?” he asks.

Jor nods. “Yeah. Gonna build it up like a knee brace, metal from here to here, if I can scrounge for the hinges. Cup it there, figure out some kinda foot-type thing for the end. At least let him move a little easier with the crutch.”

Tye doesn’t get it. What reward Jor could expect for doing the tinker for a broken thing like him. He wants, though. Wants to stand again. Even a stumbling walk would be better than hopping around. 

Jame looks at him, and he knows that naked want is on his face. Thinks he should be embarrassed about it, but can’t find the shame for how much he wants to walk again.

Jame holds something out, and it takes a second for Tye to latch that he’s supposed to take it. It’s a knife, handle different than the one Jame took off of him, but about the same reach. Leather sheath hiding the blade. 

Tye looks to Jame to see the trap, and when there don’t seem to be one, he slides the blade out of its case, checks the edge. 

“Eloc says he tried stickin’ you,” Jame says, and Tye shrugs.

“That the little’un?” 

Jame nods. “Says you didn’t hurt him, takin’ the knife.”

Tye isn’t sure what’s the right answer. “Didn’t try to,” he says. 

“I got it back to him, and took a promise he won’t try to put it in you again,” Jame says. “This one is from me to you. On your promise not to cut anybody here with it.”

Tye nods again. All said, it’s a pretty reasonable request.

Jame settles down on the other side of Jor, shifts his shoulders until he’s made an indent in the sand. 

==============

Jame settles into the sand, makes an indent and closes his eyes. He hurts, his face aching and burning at the same time, his hand throbbing in time with his heartbeat. The days since the crash have worn him down, and dealing with Eloc’s raw anger and pain was as much work as moving bodies. The boy had been all twisted up on his ma’s death; even Jame tellin’ him it was the folk on the rig that killed Neet, that he seen it himself, didn’t tamp down the kid’s anger at Tye any. 

Givin’ the knife back to Eloc had stirred up all of Jame’s own hurt over Neet dyin’ like that. His hurt over losin’ a fighter he trusted, a person he liked. He figures his own loss ain’t the same as Jor’s. Knows they laid together. Couple times Jame was pretty sure it was her in the ruttin’-shroud that came for Jor and a couple times they’d slip away when the hills was quiet, go off together out of sight of the rest.

He thinks, sometimes, that he sees a bit of Jor in Eloc’s brown eyes, the way he holds his mouth. Probably every man that got ridden, in the spread of days Eloc’s seed would have been planted, sees a little of himself in the boy. That’s the point of the shroud, after all. Half the point, at least.

Jame closes his eyes and drifts, listens to Jor starting on the leg brace, talking quiet with Tye, asking about the chase. He misses when Tye says what the core of the matter was. Something an Imperator stole. Traitored Joe on her way to traitoring the Keepers. 

Jor wakes him up when Lenora sends a pair of kids to bring them bowls of food. It’s special-occasion soup, rich broth of onions and goat meat, thickened with crushed millet and finished off with beans and chopped greens. 

Chewing is no good so Jame drinks his broth. Jor trades him bowls when he’s done, and he drinks that broth too, leaves the parts that are too much work for Jor to have. 

Tye eats like he expects somebody to come take the bowl out of his hands, hunched over and wary. Gulping down the broth and then shoveling the rest into his mouth with his fingers. 

Even in the fading light, Jame can see the marks on his throat from Jame’s hands, the bruise on his cheek, but the boy don’t seem to notice.

Jame wants to sleep. Drift off and let his aches heal some. Knows if he does he’ll wake up when it’s full-dark with a full bladder and no convenient star-lit cliff to piss over, so he forces himself up, makes the trek to add to the saltpeter barrel and then back again. 

He could head to his own patch, the place him and Jor share whenever they’re in camp. There’s not much there. Some leathers and a few boxes of gear. Most of what they claim is on their bikes, or in the shared tools and work-spaces. 

He could go to his own bed, but Jor is still at Tye’s, his project put away but still sharing space, and Jame gravitates back there, back to the hollow his body left.


	7. Chapter 7

Kell nudges Jame’s boot in the morning, wakes him up in the gray dawn hours.

Jame untangles himself from Jor, stands up and looks back and shakes his head at the sight of Tye curled into a ball, his spine pressed on Jor’s other side like he’s seekin’ the heat but scared to take it. 

Kell nods to the side, and Jame follows him, out towards where Lenora is overseeing the making of first-meal. Kell stops hims short, hand on his arm.

“What’s your vote. For war-leader.” 

Jame starts to say Raig. Knows the man is strongest, bravest. The name catches on his tongue, caught behind his teeth.

“Jor,” he says instead. 

Kell nods. “That’s the last of the tally. I’ll let her know it’s all counted.” 

He turns and goes and Jame is left at loose ends, too awake to go back and sleep. The smallest kids are out already, skuttling over the rocks like the lizards and snakes they stalk to add to the mid-day stewpot. Tryin’ to catch ‘em still groggy on the cool rocks, and Jame watches them a while, remembers him and Jor out there. 

The bigger kids have already taken the goats out to graze. Gotta go far to find any green, from what he’s heard in camp. Time’s comin’ soon to move again, move the pump to well number three, carry what they can and leave what’s too heavy for next time they’re here. They’re running out of forage, out of fire-fuel, the hunger of them eatin’ the land bare. The millet will take care of itself, be there when they rotate through again, ready to harvest. A pair’s already run on ahead, planting cowpeas and scouting for trouble. 

Jame figures the word will come today, new war-leader declared and then he and Jor can bring the answer back to their end of the pass. Maybe one more night in camp, or maybe they’ll head out when the afternoon shadows shade the floor of the canyon. 

Either way, he doesn’t have much time, and Jor’s gonna need parts if he’s gonna work on Tye’s new foot while he’s watching the pass. Tinkering ain’t Jame’s strong suit, but he figures he’ll get a start on diggin’ through the scrap-piles, pullin’ anything that looks likely for Jor to look at when he gets up.

Jame works, and it’s not much later that Jor joins him, Tye hopping along with him, crutch under one arm. 

“Lookin’ for the hinges?” Jor asks, and Jame nods. 

Tye finds himself a place he can sit and sort through an inverted car’s hood looking through bits of metal. He frowns as he works, the muscle in his jaw jumping as he grits his teeth together.

Jor keeps himself in between Tye and Jame, and Jame is glad because he’s not sure he’s up to takin’ Tye down again. Doesn’t trust himself to not answer the kid’s desperate violence with overkill. It ain’t like the boy is mean, Jame thinks. Just lost and hurt and gone a little wild with it all. 

“This?” Jame asks, showing a likely piece to Jor. He’ll have to cut it down, but the joint bends, will bend easy once it gets some grease in it. 

“Maybe,” Jor agrees, puts it in his pile of possibilities. 

Tye takes a breath so hard Jame can hear it. Thinks it sounds like it hurts, to breathe that way. Braces himself for the storm that’s comin’. 

“Why,” Tye growls, glaring down at the parts in front of him. “I can’t get sight-lines on it.” His jaw clenches, his hand tightens on the twisted slag of metal in front of him. 

Tye takes two breaths and doesn’t swing on them. 

“If you ain’t tradin’ me to Barter Town, then why you wastin’ time and food and tinker on me?” 

Jor sits back and raises an eyebrow, leaving Jame to answer. Fecker. 

“If it was the starvin’ times again. If we were goin’ hungry, if feedin’ you meant one of us wasn’t eatin’, it woulda been easy. Puttin’ a hole in you for the life to run out of.” 

He finds a place to park his ass, looks up at the slice of blue above them.

“When you’re done healin’ up, we’ll getcha workin’,” he says, hopes it sounds like reassurance instead of a threat. 

“You gotta be good at something,” Jor adds in. 

“War,” Tye says, lost like maybe that’s not enough to make him a person. “Fightin’ and throwin’. I can drive some, and I rode a bike. Flatland stuff, not your…” he makes an arcing gesture with his hand, the flight of a bike on the jump ramps. “I never took out any a yours, but I killed Buzzards before. Hunted down ferals. Went raidin’.”

In normal days, Jame wouldn’t be half so glad to hear the kid isn’t soft, but so much of their fighting force ain’ never gonna ride again, and if they can trust him on the pass, they could use him there. Eventually.

“Whatcha gotta do to get ready for warrin’?”

“Make lances,” Tye expounds, “keep the engines runnin’ and the pups watched after. Build up the rigs and the cars, make it all as strong and tough as we can.” 

Jame nods. “We use bombs instead of lances, mostly. Better for carryin’ on the hill bikes. But you could make them if somebody showed you the how of it.”

Tye nods. Looks like he’s thinking now.

“You mend, you make, you tend, you work. You become Keeper.”

“Short leg don’t mean you can’t spark strong sprogs,” Jor says.

“Huh?” 

Jame glances over from his work. Tye looks half the road between confused and scared. 

“Ruttin’?” Jor tries. 

Tye shakes his head, mouth open like he’s forgotten the trick of words.

Jor gives Jame a look, but he brought it up, he can talk Tye through it.

“I dunno how they did it where you come from,” Jor says. “Here, the women’ll come to you in the shroud. Take you somewhere quiet and ride you like a bike until you spark.”

Tye’s eyes are wide and Jame can’t tell if it’s horror or disbelief on his face.

“They take the spark an’ make a baby out of it if it’s the time, or they just do it ‘cause they like it,” Jor adds. “The better you make their ride, the more they’ll come to you.”

“Women ain’t for half-lifes,” Tye says, like the Pass’s way is the most fecked up thinking he ever heard.

“What’s half-life?” Jame asks.

Jor adds in “That like cross-wired?” and Jame’s cheeks flush like the sun’s on them. It ain’t a shameful thing, just he’s the only one here that’s that way. There’d been an oldster, when he was young, passed when Jame was still a kid. Another who’d been just a couple thousand days older than Jame, but he’d died on the pass before Jame had been old enough to fight or to rut.

Tye wrestles a twist of metal out of the pile, even though Jame can see it’s useless scrap from way over where he’s workin’. 

“Half-life is lumps and bumps. Night-fevers and dyin’ soft if I don’t die in war,” Tye says like Jame and Jor shoulda been aware already of the term. “Half-life spark makes pups that are even shorter-livin’, and their pups maybe don’t even live to their first paint.”

Jor frowns. “So you don’t give a ride? Ever?” 

“Women’s for Imperators,” Tye says. “For sons. For Immortan.”

“Women’s for whoever womens want, here,” Jame says, putting him on the right track before he runs into trouble unawares. The citadel sounds a dreg of a place to him. “You tell Nianne about this half-life stuff, she’ll make sure the women only catch your spark in the baby time if they want it.”

Tye inspects the piece of junk in his hands, and then tosses it into the far side of the pile. 

They work in quiet for a bit. Jame rolling the idea in his head, all those skull-painted boys. 

“Wait,” Jor says into the rattle of parts, the soft echoes of camp they can hear from here. “Wait, none of the women come to you?”

Tye shrugs. “Some a the half-lifes go down into the wreched, but I never wanted to. Them bein’ so skinny and dry and dirty. Always some other boy with an itch the same time I got an itch. Easiest to scratch it together.”

Jame’s heart pounds in his chest at the thought of it. Of his piston against another man’s. 

“Some a the Warboys, the ones that’d been around, they’d pair up,” Tye goes on, a little softer, more reverent, “Wheelmates. Like you two.”

Jor snorts. Jame glares at him. 

“This ragged feck?” Jor grins like he’s being sly. He looks Jame over like he’s seein’ with new eyes. “Yeah, I suppose. If I was cross-wired. Me an’ him, we been partners since he come outta our ma. Just not that way.”

Tye looks between them like they’re talkin’ a secret over his head. Maybe they are.

“Cross-wired,” Jame says, heat still high on his cheeks. “It’s not havin’ a spark for women. Or I guess if it was a woman who didn’t want no spark from a man. Not by ‘nothin better’ but just on account of not having a want for it. From a woman.”

“So you cross-wired or just never had the chance?” Jor asks, and Jame watches Tye’s face, as he catches the sudden weight of the question. He holds onto his breath, waitin’ for the answer.

“Never had the chance,” Tye says, “but that don’t mean I know for sure how it runs. My wirin’.”

Jame can’t look at him. Nobody’s ever been rough on Jame about his being cross-wired, but he’s always felt so alone, so unique in the world. To know there are others. That there’s places in the world where a person’s wiring is so inconsequential. The wheels have gone out from under him when he wasn’t looking, and he’s flying, falling. Waiting to hit.

“You should try, if they come for you,” Jor says, his voice gruff. “The women. Just do like they tell you an’ you should be okay. It’d be a good thing to know. How your spark runs.”

Tye doesn’t ask why it would be a good thing, and Jame is grateful because Jor would probably _tell_ him. 

Jame tosses a likely bit Jor’s way with a tad more force than the distance might require. If it was gonna hold Tye’s weight, it wouldn’t break from a little throw.

“Hey! Fecker!” Jor curses, but before it can go any more than that, Kell is coming up on them.

“Lenora wants you three at the circle for first-meal,” he says. “War-leader’s been decided.”


	8. Chapter 8

“War-leader’s been decided,” the man who comes for them says. 

Jor gathers up a few of the parts he has hopes for. The bones of Tye’s new leg. Rusted steel. Not chrome at all.

Jame stands and stretches. His eyes glance over and past Tye, like a ‘boy addicted to aqua-cola looks at the spigot when it ain’t even his turn to drink. Like Tye is somethin’ Jame wants but knows better than to ask for. 

Like Tye is something he can’t have.

Back at the Citadel, he’d know what to do. How to jut his chin and tip his head and give an invite back to someplace quiet. But Jor’s talkin’ on shrouds and rides and all makes him think it’s more complicated than that here. Maybe different rules. Maybe a different order to how it’s all done. 

Jor offers Tye a hand up off of the rock he’s using as a seat, and Tye hadn’t expected to be any part of the changeover, but the two of them help him get back on his foot and match his hopping pace back to the eatin’ place. 

The rock-riders have made up a circle, and Tye thinks it’s about every person he’s seen here that would be past war-pup age. All the people that’s full grown. Jame and Jor help him get settled down onto a crate, one of them on either side of him when they sit down too. Raig watches from across the empty circle, watches Tye and Jame and Jor, and Tye has a fear, that Raig being war-leader will be bad for him. That he’ll change the bargain, send Tye to the sand even if he stops stabbin’ people. 

Lenora stands up, carryin’ a split-tip pole with jangly things at the V of it. She bangs the unforked end on the ground three times and everybody goes quiet, watchin’.

“The tally for war-leader has been counted,” she says. Not loud, but her voice is like an Imperator. Not to be ignored. “Kell, the numbers.”

The guy that came for them stands up beside her. “There are three names called to serve as war-leader. Three votes say Jor.”

Jame grins and thumps Jor’s shoulder, urges him to rise, and Jor does. 

“Five for Raig,” Kell says, and Raig stands, chest puffed to make him look big, a scowl on his face. A murmur goes through the crowd, and Jame glances up at Jor. 

“Seven for Jame,” Kell finishes, and Jor grins, prods Jame with the toe of his boot until Jame makes his feet. 

“Jame, will you lead?” 

Jame hesitates, and Tye can’t breathe with the waitin’. 

“When was the count?” Jame asks. He points at Tye. “Takin’ him outta the wreck was soft-thinkin’. My soft-thinkin’ got me cut. Coulda gotten somebody else killed. Did they know, when they voted, how that worked out?”

Kell nods. “I ran the pass again last night. Made the tell of it to those with no way to know. What had happened and what you said to the skull-boy, even with you bleedin’. Got the count again. Gia said to say that Griss is dead for bein’ too hard. Three thousand gallons of guzz lost on not havin’ the nerve to wait, to see. Said you’d spend lives only where it counted. They liked your way of leadin’ the cleanup hunt, leadin’ the rebuild.”

Jame nods. “Then I’ll lead.” He watches across the sand circle, watches Raig’s reaction. Raig frowns, takes a breath, finally nods, jerky like his timing’s off. 

“Raig, will you challenge?” Lenora asks, and Raig considers. Tye can see him sizing Jame up, weighing his chances. 

“No.”

A wave of relief goes through the crowd, and Tye thinks if the two of them went at it, one would be sure to end up dead, and the riders ain’t got that kind of skim to spare. 

“Jor, will you challenge?” Lenora asks, and there’s something lighter about it. 

Jor grins. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll challenge. How you wanna do this?”

Jame smiles down, shakes his head. “Joust you for it? Best outta three?”

Tye stares. It don’t seem like Jame feels he’s being traitored, but Tye don’t know how else to take it. Only a life of knowin’ his place keeps him from hopping up on his crutch, demanding to know what the feck. 

The crowd goes to murmurs, talk about bikes and weight and skill. 

Jor must catch eye of Tye sittin’ there bewixed, because he crouches down, taps Tye’s shoulder with his fist.

“War-leader gettin’ challenge makes it a better run. Nobody can say he holds the name by votes alone. By bein’ friendly or easy. Raig…figured he might not walk away from challenge, win or lose. Him an’ Jame. Neither one a them knows how to tap out. Mebbe both a them’d die. Too high a price. Especially now.”

“But you ain’t gonna kill Jame, and Jame ain’t gonna kill you,” Tye puts out there. “’Cause you an him always been partners.”

Jor grins and bops Tye’s shoulder again and gets up. “C’mon, we’ll getcha good seat.”

They go down the pass a ways. Tye loses track of Jor and Jame both. Hears the whine and hum of those light bikes warmin’ up and echoing through the cut. 

Tye straggles back in the group, works hard in covering the distance. The cut turns, and there’s an open spanse, the sides more like hills than the top of a split-open pipe. The air smells of burnin’ guzzoline. Two bikes criss-cross the cut, up the sides and back down again. Tye recognizes those helmets, those masks, the animal skulls and shaped-leather horns. Remembers them from him bein’ dragged outta the wreck, thinkin’ it wasn’t people behind those dark faces. 

Kell pushes through the crowd and grabs hold of Tye’s arm, tucks it over his shoulder and leads Tye over to the side, where a crescent of rocks have been pushed out to sit on. Jor hadn’t lied on Tye gettin’ to watch from a good spot.

The bikes stop up on top of opposite hills and a runner goes up each side, carryin’ a lance-lookin-thing. The riders each tuck a pole under their arms, leavin’ one hand to steer by. Bonesmith must have wrapped the cut on Jame’s hand different, because he’s able to use it to hold instead of just as a blunt beater.

Lenora walks out to the spot between them. Bangs that stick of hers twice, chops down with it and then scurries out of the way. 

The engines howl and leap off the hills, catching gravel and skittering for grip. Dust billows up behind them and Tye thinks his heart is gonna bump outta his chest as they fly towards each other comin’ down the curve. 

The bikes pass, each man’s pole reachin’ for the other. Miss by cents or less, to Tye’s eye. Up to the ramp-heads again, low-rumble as they turn around, set their tires again. 

They gun down the hills, aiming to pass close enough to hit, not so close that they crash into each other. The idea that this is not gonna end in somebody broke to scrap seems a mite optimistic, Tye thinks, hands balled to fists as he watches, unable to help, to fight, to stand between them.

The bikes are comin’ too close, gonna smash up against each other, wheel to wheel, but then they both pull away, passing too far then to poke each other. Gravel patters the ground and the bikes come to a stop. Tye can see them catchin’ breath before they gun up the hills to the starts again. He wonders, if this will be enough, if it’ll count for showin’ courage to make their three passes and call it done, or if blood has to spill, if bones have to break.

The last run starts, and it looks good, Tye thinks. Looks close and controlled. The lances lower, resting angled across the handlebar of each bike. Both riders balanced, sure. They hit, and the poles shatter, splinters flying high into the air. The weight of the bikes pulls the two of them past. Jor’s wheels go out from under him, his body not moving fast enough to keep his seat, falling and sliding. 

Jame keeps his balance through the hit. His bike zigs, sole of his boot going down on the gravel, kicking the weight of it up as the center goes out from under him but not all the way lost. Tail-end fishing around the outside before he gets it back behind him. 

He gets the bike square and stops. Jor rolls over, splays out flat on his back. 

“Jor!” Jame yells, orders, and Tye waits. Watches for two long breaths for movement, for life. Jor pats the ground by his hip twice, and then raises his hand, thumb pointed at the sky. 

Jame putters over and puts the kickstand down. Climbs off the bike and reaches for Jor’s raised hand. A cry rises from the crowd, as jubilant as Tye’s ever heard for Joe. 

It’s over. It’s over and nobody got dead. 

 

============

Jor limps off the field with Jame’s help. Back to Nianne’s corner, half-bowed with the pain, whispers cuttin’ through the crowd about ribs but it don’t sound like anybody’s scared of him dying. Folk scatter back to what they were doing before naming the next war-leader was brought up. Jame and Lenora and Raig stay with Jor. 

It ain’t like Jor is anything to Tye, not official, but Jor is Jame’s crew, and Tye is Jame’s salvage. That must mean they’re near enough to being crew together that nobody stops him followin’ behind, finding a place to lean against where he can watch it all. He can see the bruises already dark on Jor’s chest as Nianne and Jame strip his gear off, layers of leather and plates of metal. Places where the edges pressed in hard, left marks. Jor grins and teases Jame for his worry, and Jame looks resigned but not contrite. 

“Orders?” Raig asks when it’s clear Jor isn’t dyin’ of this. 

“Back to your end of the pass,” Jame says. “I’ll be headin’ to mine before nightfall. Start cycling your people out, three days in camp and then back to their post. Two flares if there’s a paid crossing, one if you get hard-pressed down there, same as under Griss.”

Raig nods, unquestioning, turns on his heel and goes. 

Jame turns to Lenora. “We need some people, if we’re not gonna wear down to uselessness. Not for warrin’, just to keep watch while the fighters sleep. We’re worn. Too thin.”

Lenora nods. “I can’t give them to you now. We’re caught needing to move camp. Give me a ten-day and you’ll have them. At least one for each end, maybe more if I can spare.”

Jame nods, and it seems to Tye that maybe not getting overrun might be a mite more important, but Jame seems to accept the necessity of it. 

Tye doesn’t plan on speakin’ up, so his “Hey,” surprises even him. Jame turns, and Lenora.

“I got eyes,” he says. “Makes no sense, me bein’ just another thing that needs movin’, when I got eyes that could be on the pass.”

Jame looks him over, and Tye leans off of the wall, stands himself up straight as he can. Tries to show he’s stronger now. Tries to look like this ain’t been the hardest day he’s done since he woke up with less feet than he was born with.

Jame shakes his head, and Tye feels the hit to his pride, grits his teeth at the ache of it. 

“Hey,” Jame says before Tye can limp his useless self off. “I want you seein’ what you’re guardin’ first. We’ll talk again when I take my three days in camp.”

Tye nods again, tries to tell himself that Jame sees some kinda value in him.

Jame’s face softens somehow, and his next words feel like they’re not comin’ from a boss. “Get somebody to show you to me and Jor’s patch. You pick us a good ‘un in the new camp and keep it for us until we need it, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tye echoes. “Yeah, got it. Will-do.”

Jame’s mouth tics up in the corners, the barest hint of a smile. It’s not much, but Tye will take it.


	9. Chapter 9

Jame sees Jor back on his feet before he goes. Walking slow and bowed to the noon-meal pot. “Take your three nights in camp now,” Jame tells him. 

Jor pouts at him. “When I’m too sore to enjoy the women wantin’ my mighty spark after that joust? Thanks.”

Jame grins and shakes his head. “You’ll find a way.”

Jor catches his wrist and looks over Jame’s shoulder. Jame refuses to follow his gaze. Knows what’s over there.

“You gonna find a way too?”

Jame fights the sigh, the little-brother shuffle of his feet. He’s war-leader now, not a kid that never took a bike on the ramps before. 

“That ain’t a priority right now,” he says. “You get healthy. I’ll see you at the end of the pass in a couple days.”

Jor looks sad, but he lets Jame’s wrist go, finishes his way to a place to sit. 

Jame heads to his patch, picks up a few things he wants out on the ridge, gets a pack-full of provisions from Kell, and goes to his bike. The rumble of its engine makes sense. The wheels under him predictable, dependable. Two curves, and camp is invisible behind him. He knows he’s running away, from wanting something that he’s barely ever been able to put words to. He half-hopes that Tye gets come for while Jame is gone. That he gets rode, and figures out he’s straight-wired after all. It’d make Jame’s life simpler. And he’s not sure Tye bein’ cross-wired would make his life better. Tye sparkin’ for men is a different thing than Tye necessarily wantin’ to do it with Jame. They could both end up trapped in miserable and he can’t wish that on Tye. Wouldn’t wish it on nobody. 

He comes around the last curves of the end of the pass, a sharp zig zag that takes all of his concentration to stay on top of the ridge, to jump the gaps. Ria is at their little campsite, doin’ tinker on her bike, greetin’ him with a nod. 

“Trouble while I was gone?” he asks, and she shakes her head. 

“Nah. Not a bit. How’d it go in camp?”

“Vote said me for war-leader. Raig passed. Jor challenged.” He don’t need to say he won. 

She nods, unsurprised. “Good. Figure we gotta try it a different way, us bein’ so few now. Raig. He woulda burned it down, sooner or later. Gone hard, straight-on, when he shoulda hit a glancin’ blow. Woulda died like Griss, taken too many of us with him.”

Jame nods, grateful for her support. Grateful for a look at himself he can’t even see with a mirror. He parks his bike, finds a spot for his bedroll and backpack. Looks out across the desert, smooth rolling dunes to the horizon. It all makes sense out here. He knows who he is. What he’s gotta be. 

==========

Tye figures early on that leavin’ him to move instead of sendin’ him to the pass wasn’t a mercy. Jor helps him get their gear stowed for travel, the accoutrements that it looks like Jame and Jor are intending to share with him until he gets set on his own. Jor heads back to the pass, and another guy comes down the next morning, young and cable-thin, Re-Tom he says his name is. 

Kell puts Tye to cropping the pea bushes for the goats to munch on the road, shows him how to leave enough that they’ll green up for another crop by the time the camp is back here. There’s knee pads to do the work on, the bushes bein’ so short. Might as well be Tye doing it as anybody.

The pump is runnin’ on arm-power by then, savin’ the guzz in case they get caught broadside by unfortunate circumstance. They prop a stool, and Tye takes shifts, crankin’ the wheel, watching a glug of bright clean water splash out with every turn. He takes more shifts than anybody else, figuring he’s got little else work he’s good for. He can’t load crates onto the tractor’s trailer, can’t go with the goats gettin’ a day’s headstart.

He’s workin’ the pump when Lenora comes up on him. 

“Jame says you can sit a bike,” she says, and he nods. 

“Used to.” 

“We’ll get wheels under you for most of the move,” she says, turns and goes.

Re-Tom finds him the next day, pushing a bare-bones hill-bike. Even light as it is, it’s under-powered; Tye can tell just listening to it, high and sputtery. 

“Ain’t much,” Re-Tom says, like Tye could have reasonably expected more. “Should getcha up the hills. You gotta prop it up maybe, maybe have someone else kick-start it, sumpthin’. I got a cap I made, should fit the end of ya leg, an’ I welded on some studs here an’ here.” He points to the bright-brushed points that show new joints. “One’ll go fronta yer shin, other backa yer knee. Give you some lean an’ push. Better’n nuthin’.”

Tye nods, inspecting the work. It won’t be like having a foot, but it should let him balance himself. Re-Tom offers him the cap for his leg. It will cup around the end, and then the upper part is a reinforced quarter-round tube that goes almost to his knee in front, with an outward-facing hook he can put some weight on. Give him something to bear down on the peg with, and keep him from mangling what leg he’s got if he goes down on that side.

“I owe ya,” Tye says, and Re-Tom makes a puff-hiss noise at him like a radiator hose going. 

“Ain’t easy. Being new-took,” Re-Tom says, gruff and low. “Even comin’ from starvin’ and thirstin’, took me a while to see the better of it here.”

Tye nods, feels like sand’s slipping under his boots. Boot. He feels lost, not knowin’ who he’s above, who’s above him. The hierarchy of the Citadel so sharp-different than the give-an’-take, get-it-done of the Pass.

“Gon’ head back,” Re-Tom says when Tye can’t find some words to give him. “You stay close on Lenora an’ she watch out fer ya.”

Tye nods. He thinks he shouldn’t look forward to tomorrow, but he does anyway.

==============

Whatever Tye expected on movin’ day, what he gets is twice as loud, three times as dusty and a quarter the speed. Most of the camp’s gear is in the trailer behind the tractor, but it’s a slow moving thing, too-wide for some of the turns and rough ground. Every vehicle that can move is loaded high with packs, even his scrap of a bike. 

They ride up the cut, away from the pass. Twice, in the first day, they unload the trailer so the tractor can pop up on two wheels, bouncing and bucking over a rockfall too big to move out of the way. The strongest of the keepers take the empty trailer-- push pull and lift it over the obstruction. Tye’s never felt so useless, so broke-down busted as watching everybody else working together. The need to do something itches the back of his skull and he rides ahead to check the trail, finds a narrow ledge and climbs to the cliff-top where he can scout for trouble that just ain’t there.

The range runs ragged as far north and south as they eye can see, broken cliffs and jagged angles. He knows the Citadel is to the west. And to the east, whatever the Imperator thought she was runnin’ to with Joe’s breeders. Bartertown maybe, if she thought she could sell them. He wonders what’s at the Citadel now, if she’s made it back to claim all that used to belong to Joe. If she’s Immortan now. 

Whatever’s there, it’s not for him.

He stays parked on the ridge for a long time. Thinkin’ on Re-Tom’s words. About a life he used to have that sure as hell wasn’t better than the chance he’s got now. Even less with the amount of tinker it’s gonna take to keep him war-ready, the price he’d have to pay in barter to keep from dyin’ wretched. 

When he gets back to the break in the cut, the trailer’s already been reloaded and hauled off. A single bike is there, the rider holding her helmet under her arm, watching for him.

“You with us?” Lenora asks, and Tye nods. If they’ll have him, yeah, he’s stayin’.

=============

They get to a spot in the cut that’s wider than the rest, level and soft-piled with sand. Tye wonders if they bring some of it in, or if the wind settles it there. Tye is one of the very last to make it into camp, worried about gettin’ a good patch for Jame and Jor, but one’s been claimed for them already, looks fine to him. Jame and Jor’s crates are there, the nested hook shapes cut in the sides that show their mark, their pile of bags on top. 

Tye rides his scrawny bike up to the patch, runnin’ the engine closer to the places where people live and sleep and breathe than is considered polite, but he’s not sure he’ll make it there otherwise. His neck and back and shoulders are crisped red in the sun, from ridin’ without paint, without leathers like the keepers. His leg aches something fierce and the other half of him is sore from takin’ too much weight. 

He turns the engine off and tries to figure out how to get off without just falling on his ass and letting the bike drop the other way. 

“Got it, got it,” someone says, and Tye turns his head to see Eloc taking the handlebars from his bad side. Eloc kicks down the stand, and Tye unhooks his bad leg, swings it over the seat and then takes three barely-controlled hops before he falls ass-first onto the pile of Jame and Jor’s gear. 

Eloc hesitates, like he still wants to hate Tye, even knowing he didn’t do what he claimed. 

“Hey,” Tye says, feeling like he owes a favor, even if all Eloc saved was his dignity. 

Eloc frowns at him, stubborn and young. Tye has seen all the men-folk givin’ him their time, makin’ sure he was brought up even if he didn’t have a ma to speak for him anymore. Could be he’s heard more bits of advice than any pup would like to hear in a turn of the moon.

“Y’ain’t big,” Tye says, gesturing for Eloc to come closer. “You can’t fight nobody bigger’n you straight up. You can’t let them see the knife.” He reaches and snags the blade out of Eloc’s belt, presses the hilt into his small hand. “Here, turn it, like this with the blade under your arm. You act soft and scared, like y’ain’t no threat. Don’t let them see that blade ‘til it’s red. Copy?” 

Eloc considers, then nods. Turns and scampers off to help settle the goats in. Tye sighs and leans his elbows against his knees. Just takin’ a moment before he gets up to start arranging the camp-spot. 

===============

None of the Riders are in camp for the move, and Tye figures it’s more work than rest, so that makes sense. Three mornings after they get to the new spot, a bike comes in from Jame’s end of the pass, lean and rangy, taller than Tye by half a hand. 

“Ria!” Lenora greets her as she takes off her helmet, pulls off the top layer of leather and armor from her shoulders. The two of them go off towards the bonesmith’s domain, heads leaned in together, talking.

He don’t think nothin’ more about her, until it’s done dinner time, the moon behind the rocks and the faint light of the cooking fire all there is to see with. A shrouded figure comes drifting through, and the men all look up, hopeful but not pushing, not clamoring and brawling for the chance to dip their stick. 

Tye’s been around enough that he’s used to the shroud women, driftin’ through and snatchin’ up a man and goin’ off with them. The fact that the woman under this shroud is taller than him, though, that stands out. Her headin’ straight for him, that he notices pretty damn quick.

He looks behind him, like maybe he ain’t the intended prey. Bites back on the urge to get up and go somewhere else. She holds her hand out to him through the cloth, and beckons, and he could shake his head no, he guesses. He’s never seen nobody do it, but Jame said he could. 

She waits, hand out, and he finally takes it, levers himself up with his crutch. She gets him vertical and then leads the way off the cut, down narrow channels cut in the rock, to a broader, flatter place, the moon’s glow shining soft down on them. There is a pile of leathers already there, layers of millet grass under them to make it softer. 

“Lay down,” she says, soft and commanding, and he lowers himself with her help. 

“I can’t spark no baby,” he blurts, scooting back as she advances on him. He ain’t no deal-breaker, and if that’s what she’s after, she ain’t gettin’ it from him.

She pauses, cocks her head.

“The organic mechanic. He pikes all the half-life warboys. First time we start poppin’ up th’ lumps an’ bumps. To keep th’ lines strong.”

He’s got no idea what she’s thinkin’, but a moment later she starts comin’ his way again, slow and graceful. He has to figure then, that it ain’t a sprog she’s after with him, which makes it double the worry.

“I don’t. I never done this before with a woman,” he warns. She grabs his shins and slowly moves his legs apart enough for her to kneel in between them. Reaches and undoes the buttons on his fly. 

“Ria,” he says, more urgent, because he’s heard what happens to men what do it wrong, and he doesnt’ want to do it so wrong he gets cut. 

“Shh,” she hushes him. “It ain’t manners to use a name. To even guess.”

“I never done this,” he says again. She sits back and unlaces his boot, takes the cap off of his other leg, slides his pants off of him. 

“You can say no,” she tells him, even as her calloused hands are running up his thighs. He shivers, even though it’s not so cold yet. 

He doesn’t say no, and she climbs up over him, her thighs bare against his under the shroud. The edge of the fabric flutters over his collarbones, along his shins. Her fingers reach up to trace the scars on his chest, the mark of the V8 cut deep and clean and with purpose into his skin. He thinks he’ll start a new work, now that they’re in a camp again and not plannin’ another move for fifty days or more, enough time to heal up after. Pistons and gears for that leg, to keep the knee strong, to draw his power there since it’s doin’ the work of knee and ankle both.

“Hey,” Ria says, soft, calling his attention to where her face is, still hidden. “You with me?” 

He nods, jerky, and she reaches for his hands, draws them up under the cloth. Puts his palms on her thighs.

“You can touch,” she says, and he slides them up a bit, up to her waist. It ain’t that different than touchin’ another warboy. She’s lean and strong, not so different that it feels weird. She guides his hands up, and her chest is just barely softer than his, her nipples slightly larger. She cups his hands like she wants them, rubs herself with them a while and then guides them back down to her thighs. 

He slides his hands further up, when she shifts against them, thumbs brushing the edges of the thick hair at her crotch. A little further and then he jerks away. No stick. He knew there wouldn’t be a stick, but it’s like when he reaches down to scratch an itch on his right foot and there’s no foot there. Shocking and not-right.

“That’s okay,” she says, “Try again.” He does, slow and cautions, and she guides his thumbtips to a little nub, soft folds of skin under it, going slick when he touches, like the edges of a gaping wound bleeding again. She shifts around on him, makes a happy noise and he’s getting hard, getting thick, even as his stomach rolls, her moist parts pressing down on the underside of his shaft, pinning it against his pelvis. 

She raises up on her knees, reaches down between their bodies and guides the tip of his stick up against her. And then she sinks down, and she’s suddenly _around_ him and it’s so foreign, so weird, so intense. He gasps, hips coming up in shock, like his body knows what to do with this, even if his brain is still trying to catch. 

“Yeah,” she sighs, encouraging him, rocking in a way that draws the pleasure up from his legs, down from his chest. Focuses it all there, inside of her, inside her guts and he wants to puke and he wants to spurt. Too much. Too strange. He gasps and chokes and he sparks inside of her and she grinds against him, gasps and moans like it’s good. 

She rises up enough that his limp stick slides out of her. She rests her hands on his shoulders, leaning on him, holding him down even though he’s not trying to get anywhere, head hanging low like they just did more than a few revs worth of work. 

Tye shudders and she heaves offa him to sit on the leathers beside him, flipping the shroud off over her head. Her hair is short, her jaw strong, a scar from the side of her lower lip down her chin. The shadows hide the parts of her that are unfamiliar to him just as well as the shroud had.

He doesn’t know where to look, stares up at the night sky. 

“No?” she asks, not unkind, and he shakes his head. Can’t find the words for how much he never wants to do that again. 

She reaches out, brushes her fingers against his face between his eye and temple. He frowns and flinches, even though her touch is gentle. He’s leaking water, isn’t quite sure why.

“They wanted me to be the one. Take your first ride. Figuring I could stop you if you was more feral than you’d seemed.”

He chews at his lower lip, not sure what she’s expectin’ him to say.

“There’s others,” she offers, “Mebbe could make it better than I did it.” 

He shakes his head again. Thinks on the other women, smaller and lighter. How wrong they’d be between his hands. He doesn’t want. Doesn’t want at all. 

“Yeah, okay,” Ria says, flips the shroud back over herself. She gets up, tosses him his pants and walks back down the path to the camp. 

Tye shivers, wriggles into his pants and pulls a swath of leather around his shoulders. He stumbles back down, and Ria is by the cookfire, Lenora and Kel beside her. Nobody looks up as he makes his way to his patch, nobody says a word.


	10. Chapter 10

The pass is quiet when Ria comes back, the roar of her bike’s engine cutting the silence. Jame looks down, waves to her and then turns glass back to the waste, to the puff of dust at the limits of his vision. 

Ria’s motor cuts off and he hears her climbing up beside him, stretching out on her belly on the sun-hot rocks. Jame passes his glass to her, and she watches the dust for a while, until whoever it was turns away, all sign of them blown away with the wind. 

“He wasn’t what I thought he’d be. Your salvage,” she says, and Jame frowns. She’s quiet for long moments, as the two stare out into the nothing. “Thought he’d go at ruttin’ like his kind go at war,” she continues. “They was waitin’. The others. Until I could come to camp. Make sure he wouldn’t go wild first time he got a whiff under the shroud.”

Jame’s cheeks burn, to hear her talkin’ on things like that, things women and men weren’t supposed to say to each other. 

“I dunno if he was born cross-wired like you, or if those schlangers in the Citadel tore him up an’ put him back together in ways he weren’t meant to be.”

He’s not sure what in hell he’s supposed to say to that. What it even means.

“He said he can’t spark a sprog. That the organic mechanic there cut him. I asked Leanne. Said yeah, a slice could be made. Let everything seem to keep workin’ but no juice in the pipes.”

Jame winces. Squirms at the idea of getting cut there, cut on purpose. Wonders if they held him down, or if it was like the rest a Tye’s scars, too methodical to have been done on a struggling body. 

Ria sighs. “I let him know there was interest. Some a the others. Figured I wasn’t the best for anybody’s first. He said no. I figure he’s waitin’ for somebody with different gear.”

Jame puts the glass back to his eye, scans the horizon even though there’s no sign of anybody out there. 

Ria huffs, and rolls over. Claps her hand to the back a his shoulder before she stands.

“You takin’ your three days in camp soon?” 

Roc is the only one who hasn’t had a turn. Jame considers letting them all have another rest before he heads in.

“Yeah,” he says instead. “Soon.”

====================

The spiked vehicle cruises the dunes. The plume of dust cannot be helped, but the driver keeps it slow to minimize the silhouette of it.

“ _The rig goes through us_ ,” the one with the binoculars says, scanning the cliff-line. The pass is a narrow line of darker shadow on the rocks. “ _Goes into the pass. Day later, tries to come back through. Crashes into the arch. Whatever was so important, so valuable. Might still be there. In the pass. Figure. That many warboys. That much firepower. Can’t be much left guardin’ the pass. Guardin’ the treasure._ ”

The leader sets back in his seat. The rock-riders are formidable, for such light-weight runners. Attacking the pass is more than attacking the people, though. The very rocks work in their favor, a gauntlet of turns and traps. A maze of death and no clear prize to make it worth the grind of getting through it all. 

He grumbles low in his throat, narrows his eyes behind his spiked mask. 

A new approach is in order.

===============

Sundown is always a relief, there on the cliffs guarding the pass. Respite from the blazing sun, darkness another ally to protect all they keep. 

The vehicles drive outta the fire of the day’s end, the dust of their passage a dark smear against the orange glow, their shadow reaching like fingers towards the cliffs, towards the pass. 

“Incoming!” Jame shouts down from his perch on watch. Starts checking the buckles on his leathers, pulls his helmet on. The sweat and rust smell of it closes around his head, and his senses crack to sudden clarity, his heart revving up with the engine on his bike.

The other Keepers join him. Wary, ready. Ria stares down her glass at the approaching convoy.

“Spikers!” she calls, her lip curling in a sneer.

Nobody needs to say how little sense there is in it, Spikers coming’ in so late. The canyons are already shadowed after the first turn, hiding the traps and turns of the pass even more. The thorn-bush cars don’t slow up, coming closer and closer.

“They’re tough,” Jame starts, his first words as war-leader. “Throw for the gaps, the driver’s slits, the holes they fire out of.” He runs it through in his head and can’t figure what the Spikers are trying at. It’s easy to think they’re fume-headed and an easy fight, but he won’t trust his people’s lives to that being all there is to it.

“Ride safe,” he tells his Keepers, his own voice loud in his helmet, hopefully loud enough outside of it. “Nobody dies. Nobody falls. We keep hittin’ them. Drive them on until the night and the pass fix them for us. If they crash out, we keep the fighters pinned down until morning and finish up then.”

There are head-jerk nods and shoulder-thumps and then the riders scatter, bombs ready. Jame can hear the Spiker engines, and he kicks off the rock face below his wheels, pushing his bike into motion. Down a swoop and up a ramp, throwing the first bomb as he jumps a gap and lands on the other side. 

The four Spiker vehicles are battened down tight, the drivers’ slits guarded with a thick ridge of spikes above, the weapons gaps closed up and armored. In the darkness of the pass, Jame can barely see to pick a target for his bombs. They cut speed, coming around the tangles the riders put up from the Citadel’s wreckage, but they don’t stop, don’t bother shootin’ back at the shadows criss-crossing the hills above them. 

One of the cars drifts too far to the edge of the track, hits a pit trap and comes to a crunching stop. Jor and Ria peel off to cover them, to rain fire down on the crew if they get out to flee or try to dig their vehicle out. Jame guns his engine, hits a couple jumps and gets a turn ahead of the attackers. They’ll need something bigger than bombs to slow them down, and there are too few keepers to have stationed someone here ahead of the assault. 

He gets to the rigged up pile of rocks at a turn of the pass and lays his bike down gettin’ there fast as he can, gettin’ the pole wedged into the stack under his hands, throwin’ his weight on it.

The pole flexes and Jame has a heart-stop moment where he fears the pole will break, that the hard-shelled Spikers will get past him, will get through the pass or into the soft parts where their people shelter. 

And then the rocks shift. Tumble. Not enough to block the road, but a rock the size of Jame’s skull leaves a hell of a hole when it falls far enough, and this is a good high point overlooking the pass. 

The first driver guns it, zigs around the rockfall but clips the wall, goes wheels-up and in the path of the next. The second runs right under a chunk of rock and the driver’s side of the roof caves in like a cup, the truck-thing hitting the next curve of the track dead-on, spikes shattering and raining down.

The last vehicle turns, jerky starts and stops and backwards stutters filling the cut in the rocks with dust and exhaust and Jame too far above to get a good target for a bomb. It finally gets pointed west. Jame sees Re-Tom on the far ramp, ready to escort them out with a hail of explosions so he follows his own orders and camps the wrecks below, one of them smoking and the other still and silent. He watches and waits. One of the truck’s doors opens, but whoever did it is out of guzz, half-falling out of the opening and onto their own spikes, laying still after that.

He waits, up where he’s got clear sight lines on the two under him and the canyon in either direction. Re-Tom appears back on a lower cliff-edge, gives the all-clear hand-sign and then gestures to the wreck, question-sign.

Jame gives him back _unknown_ and starts winding his way down, now that there are other eyes. Together, they check the truck, the dead driver on the ground. Nobody else inside, moving or not. Go to the next and a Spiker rushes Jame as soon as he pries the door open, yelling in words he can’t parse, strange sounds around the blood on his mouth.

Re-Tom pikes him in the back with his long knife and the Spiker goes down. There’s another in the car, still warm but not breathin’. Jame’s not sad to have one less fight on them tonight, but he’d sure appreciate knowin’ what the dreck their plan had been, why they’d attack so late and with so few.

The sun is down, and there isn’t much more that Jame can do, even by the light of the full moon. They mount up and ride back along the floor of the pass, back to where Jor and Ria make sure the last vehicle hasn’t decided to suicide by coming back again. 

They won, but Jame lies awake in his patch for half the night, gnawin’ at the things that don’t make sense.

——————————————————


	11. Chapter 11

Tye pushes the broad leather hat up and wipes the sweat from his forehead. His hair is growing in, itchy and foreign. Near fifty days among the keepers, best he can reckon, the scruff of it almost enough to hold between his fingers. He misses his chalky paint and the smooth dome of skin over his skull. The hat and leather cape that he has to wear to keep the sun from crisping his skin scratch and rub, a small constant irritation as he works.

He looks down the row of pease that still need to be harvested. He’s gotten as many as he can reach, and he grabs his crutch in the middle and scuttles sideways a few feet without bothering to stand up straight, drags his harvest basket towards himself with the long strap. Around the sheltered patch of fertile soil, the younger pups jump from rock to rock, chasing lizards and each other. Some of the older ones work the line of plants with Tye as the sun rises and their shadows shrink. Soon, it will be time to go in, to find shade and water and rest out the heat of the day.

He works, head down, hands busy, until a shriek pierces the air, shrill and sharp. He looks to the pup who made the sound, sure to see the bloody white of broken bones, a snake-bite, something else nobody ever wants to see on the little ones.

The pup is up though, on their feet, arm stretched pointing, screaming “Taker! A taker!”

Tye turns, already pushing himself up again. There’s a person, spiked half-mask and shoulder pads of a Buzzard. 

“Go in!” Tye yells at the pups, his heart pounding like the war drums are inside his chest. “Go in, get help!” Tries to remember who of the Keepers’ fighters is in camp now. How fast they could get here.

He’s already playing the angles, the slope and terrain. No way he can get up to the Buzzard before the Buzzard gets over the top line of the rocks, if they keep headin’ the way they ar. No way he can catch them on the rubble behind, but he does his best to get there anyway, hopping on the crutch and his one foot, tripping and catching himself on one hand before he can get up again.

“Hey!” he yells, even knowing they don’t speak the same words as him. “Hey you rusted out piece of drek!” 

The Buzzard looks his way but doesn’t pause, but then there’s one of the kids in his way. Eloc. Eyes wide and one hand held up like he’s begging the Buzzard not to slice him. Sayin’ something that Tye can’t catch from this far away. He uses the step the Buzzard misses to get closer, moving higher to cut off the path the Buzzard will take to the pass or the rugged cliffs on either side. If the Buzzard gets out. If he tells the others, they’ll never stop. Not with such a sweet prize in their sights. They’ll burn the Keepers way of life to the ground. McFeast on the only good thing Tye’s ever known.

Eloc screams, rage and not pain, and the Buzzard backhands him away. The knife in Eloc’s other hand flashes out as he falls, point hitting the Buzzard in his thigh. Not a hard enough stab to stick, but the Buzzard limps his next few steps and Tye gets closer. Close enough. He misses a step and goes down hard, scrambles forward on three limbs. Shifts his grip on the crutch and lashes out with it, hooks the Buzzard’s leg and pulls him back, pulls him down. Grabs his boot with his free hand and drags himself up the heavy cloth of the Buzzard’s trousers.

The Buzzard punches down, knocking Tye’s hat askew, the spikes on his fist getting through the leather and the skin underneath and blood floods Tye’s left eye, bright flashes of sunlight as he blinks it away replaced by darkness a second later as it covers him again. 

Tye smiles; his heart sings, to be doin’ what he’s made for, what he’s good at. He scrambles over the Buzzard, holdin’ on with his knees as he gets a hand around the Buzzard’s throat. The Buzzard bucks him off, but Tye’s got his other hand tangled in his straps, keeping him from wriggling away. Tries to reach down and grab the knife Jame gifted him with but he doesn’t have enough hands to hold on and protect his own throat and get the blade. They struggle, punching and grabbing. Tye ends up on the bottom, rocks digging into his back, the Buzzard’s weight crushing down on his guts. 

The Buzzard leans down, mouth open to bite Tye’s cheek. Tye shoves him back, twists to knee him in the piston. The Buzzard gets his hands around Tye’s throat and starts to squeeze. Tye figures he’s got more reach, slams one hand under the Buzzard’s jaw and then presses up, getting a precious gasp of air. The Buzzard’s teeth close down on his fingers and Tye pushes in instead of jerking back. Rams half his fist into the Buzzard’s mouth and jabs up with his thumb on the underside of the Buzzard’s jaw. 

The Buzzard chokes and tries to heave off, and Tye follows his momentum, Kami-crazy and wild. Follows him and uses the grip inside the Buzzard’s mouth to smash his head against the rocks. Once, twice, spikes breaking off and cutting Tye and Buzzard alike. Three times and the Buzzard goes still, eyes open to the sun’s high beams. 

Tye takes a breath and laughs. Pulls his bloodied hand from the roadkill’s mouth and flops over on his back. 

He hurts, his face where he took the punch. Fingers cut up and maybe broken. Ribs and knees aching and the end of his short leg raw and stinging.

A shadow comes between him and the sun, dimming the insides of Tye’s eyelids from angry red to shadow. Tye hopes, he hopes when he opens his eyes there will be another Buzzard there for him to fight. 

It’s only Eloc though, face pale and his hand still gripped tight around the handle of his knife, the blade hidden under his arm again. 

“Glory,” Tye breathes, spits blood and pushes himself up on his elbow. “What a day.”


	12. Chapter 12

The Keepers at the west end of the pass take watches through the night, the moonlit road below kept under the gaze of its protectors. A wind picks up sometime before morning, not the nightmare wall of sand and lightening that came the day the Imperator betrayed them, but enough of a steady rasp that they take shelter in their leather lean-to against the cut of it. 

Jame wakes as the first thin rays of sunlight pick their way through the highest rocks. Shakes the grit out of his mask and armor and brings his bike out of the protective cover he laid over it in the night. 

“Goin’ to go check the ramps,” he tells Jor. The paths and man-made jumps need maintenance, that is no lie, but it’s a sense of ill ease that draws Jame from their high mountain camp. He needs to see. That the pass is still held. That their world is as right as he can make it.

He rides the hills. Notes the jumps that are soft, angles that are rounded, places where the landing is unevened by too many bikes hitting. If the Spikers come again, they’ll need those to be solid. Sure. 

He looks ahead, to the high ridge where he dropped the rocks. If the Spikers come again, another fall might be the only thing that can stop them. 

The path is narrow and rocky, and without the rush of adrenaline pushing him on, he picks his way up, using his legs to push off of boulders as he guides the bike’s wheels along the track. From the highest place on the pass, he stares east, into the rising sun. To the west, the Citadel is too far away to be seen, but the threat of it is almost a thing he can taste. He looks north, and is comforted by the tendril of smoke rising from the main camp, morning-meal on the hearth. The kids will be out on the rocks, looking for lizards and herding the goats to grazing areas. 

His relief lasts only a few heartbeats and then his gaze is caught by something off, something that doesn’t belong. A bootprint in the sand, unmarred by the night’s wind. A mark on a nearby rock, a smudge of blood not yet dulled to brown. 

His breath catches. One a them got past. Bailed out of a car in the pursuit or hid inside until the keepers had left them for dead. One of them, or more, is inside the line of protection, is past their armor and into the soft meat of their people. 

He stands frozen, a dozen options racing through his mind in a single moment. To go back to the western camp for reinforcements. To drop a bomb and hope the sound brings Jor or one of the others to help. He’s too far away for the sound to carry, though, and it might alert the Spiker ahead of him that they’ve been discovered. It’s too far to go back and then hope to get to the home camp before the Spiker. 

Jame’s teeth grit together and he straddles his bike, roars down the mountain towards home. The dust whips against his goggles, slips and slides under the worn rubber of his tires. 

The settlement comes into view as he rounds the last curve, and he’s not sure if he’s relieved or terrified that they’re already up, tools and weapons in hand. Kids run one direction and adults head towards the high patch of soil where some pease are grown. Jame drops the bike and pulls the broad heavy blade from his back sheath. Charges through, up the narrow gorge. 

“What’s happened?” he growls at Kell as he passes. 

“Taker!” Kell answers, eyes wide. The horror all the kids are taught to fear, to run from. “Tye and Eloc…”

And then Jame is beyond him, climbing the rocky way at a full-burn run. He bursts from the narrow passage and into open space, the rock hills and spatterings a green between the stones bright after the shadows. 

Tye is there, standing, Eloc at his side trying to prop him up. Half Tye’s face is drenched in blood from ragged cuts along his scalp-line, but he’s grinning, the one eye Jame can see for the blood wide and bright. 

“Jame!” Tye calls, jubilant. “Jame! Witness!” 

Jame doesn’t know if Tye recognizes his mask, or his stride, or if he’d just been so sure Jame would be the one to come for him. 

Tye takes three hops away from Eloc and crashes chest-first into Jame, and Jame grabs onto him to keep him from falling. 

“Witness,” Tye says again. “I can still do war. I fought him. We fought him. Eloc stuck him and I caught him and his thoughts are all over the rocks now.” He gestures, and something is wrong with his hand, fingers curled and fist already swollen. He fought. Tye fought. For them, for this place.

A corpse lies, a crumpled pile of spikes, up near the ridge-line. 

Tye leans in, bumps his head against Jame’s face-plate, smears red over his visor. His arms are strong around the back of Jame’s neck, his bare chest against the plates and leathers of Jame’s armor. “I fight, I live, I fight again,” he says like a joke. 

“Witnessed,” Jame says, the right word by the way Tye grins back at him, wild and bright. A trickle of blood has caught on the skull-boy scars on his cheekbone. Another winds down the curve of his neck as he tips his head back to look at Jame from the bottoms of his eyes. 

Jame’s heart takes a stumble. He wants. Wants to carry Tye back down to safety. Wants to carry him back to Jame’s patch and spread him out on the leathers and check his wounds. To see for himself that Tye’ll live through the damage he’s taken. And then. Then his desires go vague around the edges. Wants Tye’s skin against his lips. Wants to press his nose to Tye’s throat, wants to touch him inside of his trousers. Wants to see him spark. Wants to be the one to bring him to his spark.

Jame jerks his head to clear his thoughts. Not here. Not now. 

The others are up by then, lingering back. Afraid. Some have served as guards on the pass, but most have not. The threat isn’t over, and Jame hands Tye off to a couple of the inexperienced fighters. Better for Jame’s thinking to have him more than an arm’s reach away. 

“Take him to Nianne. Eloc too,” he says, and Tye tries to shrug the hands off of him. 

“No, I can fight. Jame, I can fight.” 

“Take him,” Lenora repeats the order, and Tye doesn’t like it but he stops struggling.

“We need to split up,” Jame says. “Keep each other in sight, but we need to sweep the hills. Make sure that was the only one. Kell, go to Jor. Tell him what’s happened. Stay there to help keep watch.”

Lenora nods silent approval—this is war-business and he’s war-leader. 

They spend the heat of the day on the rocks, searching but not finding any other threat. Jame is sweaty and exhausted by the time he comes down, into the blessed cool shade of the camp. 

Eloc and Tye are still at the bonesmith’s patch, so Jame pulls off his helmet and goes to them. Eloc is curled up asleep. Close enough that his spine is pressed on Tye’s hip. Tye is awake, short leg bandaged and his right hand soaking in brine. Three rows of stark black stitches close the cuts on his head. His manic smile is dimmed and he looks up as Jame comes to him.

“Were there others? Didja get them?”

Jame shakes his head. “If there were more, they didn’t leave sign.”

Tye moves to sit up and Nianne glares him back down. “You tryin’ to lose the hand too?” she asks and he shakes his head, settles again with his fist back in the bucket.

Jame sits down next to Tye. Asks him what he saw, what direction the Spiker came from, which way he was runnin’ to. Tye doesn’t know much. Spiker running from vaguely the direction of a hill that might have overlooked part of the camp. Tye figured him enough of a problem to stop him breathing. Jame thinks about what way the Spiker would have been heading. He needs to go back to the western camp. See if the Spikers are waiting for their men. Maybe give the dead back and watch if they leave or linger. 

“Got me some shine new scars, eh?” Tye says into Jame’s thoughtful silence. He smiles softer than Jame is used to from him. His eyes linger on Jame’s jaw, on the chunk that Tye took out of him with Eloc’s knife. “They like scars here?” 

Jame snorts. “After this? Ending a Taker that got this close to camp? They’ll be lined up for a turn in the shroud with you.”

Tye wrinkles his nose, and Jame thinks maybe Ria was right. That whether it’s natural or something the fecked up life in the Citadel did to him, Tye won’t be givin’ rides to the women, and havin’ no spark for making sprogs, there’s no sense in them trying too hard. 

“But yeah,” Jame adds, his voice fitting strange in his throat. “Mebbe they don’t know what to think of your fine-craft scars, but the rest. Hard-earned. They appreciate that kind of thing.” He’s not sure who the ‘they’ he’s talking about is anymore. If he’s talking himself, then he’s sure as sunrise lying because those well-laid, deliberate scars on Tye’s chest, on his upper arms and the skull-marks on his lips and cheeks, they make Jame’s fingers itch to find what they feel like right now. 

“Get a shroud,” Nianne grumbles at them as she come back and yanks Tye’s hand out of the brine bucket. Jame’s face burns and he doesn’t know. What he’s doing. Feels like riding full-throttle through the pass in the dark. 

“You seen Lenora?” he asks and Nianne nods him down the cut a ways and Jame goes to find her. He’s got a body to move and her bike has a sidecar. 

===================

The men on the sand wait in the shadows of their cars, what glass they have turned towards the cliffs. Three vehicles stayed in the pass. Six soldiers. One had to live. At least one. One to come down and tell them what the prize was. What was important enough for the ghost man of the Citadel to leave his fortress and come to the desert.

Shadows move up along the edge of the cliff and they turn their engines over, shift into gear. 

They’re close enough to see the first body fall, twisting in the air and no way to tell if they were still breathing when they caught air. They count. Hoping. Four. Five. Six.

The Spikers turn and drive away.


	13. Chapter 13

Jame takes Tye’s kill off in the sidecar of Lenora’s bike, his face hid behind the horns and leather of his helmet. Tye watches him go, the tip of his tongue flicking out to soothe a split in his lower lip. Nianne follows Tye’s gaze and then turns back to her work on his hand, running a fine brush into the Buzzard’s bites. 

It’s enough of a hurt that Tye could use a distraction, and thinkin’ on Jame is a good one. 

“Shroud, eh?” he says, and Nianne goes still for just a tic. Looks up to check his eyes. 

Tye knows he didn’t take a hit to the head. Not a hard one anyways. 

“It’s not a thing to take light,” Nianne says, her hands cupped around Tye’s. 

Tye tastes at the cut on his lip again, not sure how to say it, that he might not know the full weight of what he’s asking but he’ll step careful anyway.

Nianne must read it in his face, because she goes back to work on his hand. “Next time he’s in camp for a night, I’ll get you the shroud. You go up. You wait. He says no and you walk away. He says yes and you take it someplace quiet.”

His heart takes a double-beat in his chest, and Tye doesn’t think he’s ever felt this kind of wanting. Like it’s not just his piston pointed Jame’s way. 

Nianne starts a careful wrapping of clean bandages around his hand. At his side, Eloc startles awake and Tye puts his other hand on the pup’s back. 

They don’t talk about the shroud anymore after that. Nianne tells him what to come back to her for, if something goes wrong with his head or his leg or his hand before she sees him the next day. 

“Heal up,” she tells him, like he hadn’t been planning to, and then Eloc brings him his crutch and lends him a shoulder and helps him back to Jame and Jor’s patch. 

===========

Jor is the one to bring Lenora’s bike back, mid-day the next day. He pulls a bundle from the sidecar, bulky as a person but not near the weight by the way he’s carrying it. He looks around, finds Tye helping with the meal and waves him over. 

Tye passes the bowl of pease he’s shelling and levers himself up, heads over to see. 

“Got the leg done,” Jor says, points Tye down to sit on a crate while Jor unties the bundle. There’s a bunch more than a leg in there, pads and helmets and armor. Jor kneels at Tye’s feet. Unties the end of his pants and rolls the edge up over the bandages Nianne wrapped around his scraped leg. 

Jor hesitates, like he’s scared of touchin’. 

“The bone’s good,” Tye says, half a protest. “Nianne said it’s just skin that I busted. Long as it doesn’t red-up or run hot it’s fine.” 

Jor nods and brings the tinker-work leg over. Brings it up Tye’s thigh and buckles it with straps and leather, above and below the knee. Checks the cup of it around the end of his leg. The ‘foot’ of it is not much footlike, a curve of springy metal. Tye thinks it’ll be good on the flats, but can’t quite imagine it in the rocks. 

“I’ll start work on another one for ridin’,” Jor says. “Spinning ball joint so you can plant and pivot. Might be better when you’re up over the camp too.” 

He offers Tye his hand and Tye takes it, grabs his crutch with the other. It’s an odd thing, to put weight on it, to stand almost-balanced, just a light touch on the stick and Jor’s hand keeping him centered. 

Jor waits, lets him get the test of it. “How’s it feel?”

Even with most of his weight on the thigh-straps, the wound feels like gears grinding without the ease of oil. Like cable rusted tight around a pulley.

“Good,” he says. He can stand, and that’s the important part. Not really walk, but that’ll come. He’ll make it come.

Jor makes a grumble in his chest like that’s not what he wanted to hear. 

“Don’t push it too much. Nianne was saying before I went out to the pass that you’ll do damage if you don’t work up to it.” Jor looks him over like he’s thinking maybe Tye is driving more engine than he can handle. 

“I can do it,” Tye says. “I can stand up. I can do war.”

“You don’t have to rush this,” Jor says. 

Tye snorts.

Jor steps back enough to let Tye balance on his own. 

“No, sit,” Jor says. “You can try again tomorrow. You’re the color of paint again.” He eases Tye back down on the box, reaches for the buckles.

“No,” Tye says, “No, a little longer.” 

Jor huffs and sits back on his heels. 

“I need. Need to be ready,” Tye says. Ready to earn his place. 

“Jame said you wanted to fight. Even all busted up, you wanted to go.” 

“I can do war,” Tye says again.

Jor shakes his head. “We’d be revved to have you on the pass, but you don’t _have_ to fight. Not unless one a them guns past us again.” 

That doesn’t make sense. War is what Tye is _for_. 

Jor seems to see it as a race he won’t win and he throttles back to save his guzz. “You get out there, remember to follow orders and Jame’s order is to not die unless there’s no other way. Unless it’s worth the cost.”

“I fight, I live, I fight again,” Tye says, liking the echo of the old words in the new. His fingers itch to make the sign of the V8, but the big engines have no place here. 

“You stand, you rest, you stand again,” Jor chides him, reaching to unfasten the buckles.

This time, Tye lets him.


	14. Chapter 14

Nianne won’t clear Tye to work the day after he fights the Buzzard. Jor stays close though, bringing Tye with him to look through the scrap pile again. Helps Tye put his leg on a few more times, take a few steps before he takes it off again. 

Eloc trails behind the two of them, his face half a mess with bruising where the Buzzard hit him. Quiet even when Jor tries to get him talking. It’s not good, Tye thinks, for a pup to be blooded so young, still soft inside.

A goat bleats and then goes quiet, and Jor says something about a hero’s feast.

The sun starts to sink and the people start to wander in towards the cook-fire. More people smile at Tye than all the rest of his life put together. Warm welcome, even from folk who’d barely looked at him before, folk who’d resented him breathin’ while their own were dead on the pass.

Tye gets put in between Lenora and Jor, Eloc leaning back against Jor’s knees. Dishes are served up and passed, and the bowl Tye is handed is thick with meat, more than he’s ever seen on one plate at a time. He snags a chunk out and stuffs it in his mouth before the kid who is helping feed them shoves a spoon in his hand. 

The circle goes quiet for a while, everybody eating. Eloc finishes first, of the people in Tye’s sight-line. Lifts his head and starts looking around. His eyes settle on Tye’s bowl, and Tye knows what’s coming next. Doesn’t flinch when Eloc’s spoon sneaks in and snags a scoop of broth. He gives Eloc a long slow look, eyebrow raised. Waits to see if the pup looses his nerve.

Eloc comes back for a second thiefing of Tye’s dinner, and Tye lets him get it on his spoon before he growls and snaps at the air, acting fierce but letting the smile play around his lips, show in his eyes. 

Eloc jerks back, loses half of what he stole into the dirt and licks the rest off his spoon. 

Tye tips his bowl into his mouth, drinks most of the wet out of it so it doesn’t get spilled. Puts the hand holding the bowl back on his knee, a dare, smile playing at his lips. 

He sees Eloc gather his nerve. On the edges of his attention, Jor draws his own bowl closer to his chest, out of the impending danger. 

Eloc twists and darts in with his spoon and Tye deflects with his own. Eloc is on him then, grabbing for the bowl and Tye pushes backwards off the crate him and Jor are using as a bench. Turns his wrist to keep the bowl up and level as he falls on his back. Flips over and gets to his knees before Eloc catches up. 

They wrestle, Tye one-handed and one-footed and trying not to push on Eloc’s bruises. It’s a closer battle than he’d like to admit, Eloc getting a knee into Tye’s ribs and Tye pushing him around when he gets the opening. Letting him get closer and closer each time. 

Eloc snatches the bowl and Tye laments “I’ll starve now, you wretched pup,” but he’s grinning too hard for Eloc to credit it much. His chest hurts and he’s more tired than the little fight should have taken out of him. His cut up knuckles throb in their wraps. 

A shadow comes between him and the dim glow of the fire, Jor offering a hand up. Tye takes it, hops the two steps back to his seat. There’s a low murmur and Tye wonders if he’s already burned through the good will he got killin’ the Buzzard. Jor puts his own bowl in Tye’s hand and they pass it back and forth between bites while Eloc gulps down the prize he stole. 

“We’ve heard the story from Jame, and the facts from Nianne,” one of the oldsters says, leaning in towards Tye. “How about you make the tell of it. How it was up on the hill.”

Tye looks around and there’s nothing but eager eyes. He coughs. Wishes he had the leg on so he could stand up. 

The ritual words of a self-witnessing rise on his lips. He begins. “No shit, there I was…”

Later, after the tale is done and Tye has sit while various trinkets of gratitude are piled in his lap, bits of gears and small tools, beads of glass and feather, Jor helps him back to their patch. Tye tries to keep up with the crutch, but it’s most-like Jor carrying him and Tye helping a little with the balance.

“Why’d you do that?” Jor asks, voice quiet. “With Eloc. He ain’t yours.”

Tye frowns, puzzling the question over. Not the why of him doing it, but the why of Jor asking that question.

“Needed doing,” Tye says, the simplest explanation, the best he can put words on. Jor eases him down in the soft-sand bowl, to the bed of leathers. 

“He was better,” Jor says. “After that. Burned some a the shade offa him.”

Tye nods. Glad he wasn’t the only one who thought so. 

“Jame’s coming soon,” Jor says when Tye doesn’t have any more words. “He’ll probably cut Eloc’s hair then.“ He ruffles Tye’s hair, as long as the last joint of his thumb now. “Yours too, I’d wager.”

Tye isn’t sure of all the meanings, but he’s seen that only those coming in from the pass are shorn in just the same way. He’s not made for questioning his superiors, but he has to know. Even in the Citadel, Eloc would be in a place between. Not pup, not War Boy. 

“Eloc—Jame won’t…he’s not ready for the pass. He’s small still. Not his full growth.” He can hear in his own voice that he’s begging. They can’t be so short of bodies that they’d take Eloc before him. If he has to walk sooner, he’ll do that.

Jor stretches out on the leather beside him, groans as he relaxes out his back. “Nah. ‘Course not. Just to show the change. That he’s more now than he was. Done more.”

Tye lies down too, space between them though he knows it’ll shrink in the cool of the night. He ‘s glad of it, to know he won’t be alone. 

He wakes as the sun filters down into the canyon, his face pressed between Jor’s shoulder blades. He’s warm, weighted down. Opens his eyes and sees Eloc draped between them, Jor as a pillow and Tye’s hips under his knees. Another of the pups is against Tye’s back, and two more on the other side of that one. 

Jor stirs and Eloc rolls, elbow catching Jor in the kidneys. Jor makes a noise of confusion and then a snort of humor. “Wait ‘til I tell Jame about this,” he mutters, and the pile settles once more, a few more moments of sleep stolen before the camp wakes.


	15. Chapter 15

“And when I wake up, we’re half-buried in kids. Eloc sprawled across us like a babe in arms, Nique and Mela up in Tye’s space like he’s their personal campfire keepin’ them warm.”

Jame snorts, trying to imagine it. 

“He said he’d cared for pups before,” Jor reminds him. “Never would a thought it from the skull-boys, but they have to come from somewhere, eh?”

Jame looks out at the setting sun. Thinks he’ll ask Tye about it, next time he’s back to camp. 

“You takin’ your turn soon?” Jor asks. Seeing Jame’s thoughts is something he’s always had a skill for. 

Jame shakes his head. “I need to make sure it’s settled out here. That the Buzzards aren’t comin’ back for more.”

Jor makes a discontented sound and Jame turns to look at him.

“No sense in wearing yourself to nothing,” Jor says. “You’re fifty days of hard work and sweat and more days before that since you took some time. You’ll be no use if you’re dull as a garden blade.”

He’ll keep pushing, Jame knows. Keep on him until he caves to brotherly concern. 

“Soon,” Jame promises. “I just need to see the ramps all rebuilt and make sure we don’t get hit again like that.” He needs to walk the pass, see if there’s another place they can add a trap. Maybe a spiked chain they can drag away when a paid toll comes through. Another rockfall or two, if he can find a place that’s both high and accessible. Make a good place if there’s not one natural.

“Jame,” Jor says, soft, and Jame looks up at him. “It’s no selfish thing to let yourself have something good. Take a ride and be happy.”

Jame coughs, feels his cheeks warm in the cooling evening air. “I’m not _avoiding_ going in,” he says. “Just. Not sure where to start if I do. How to ask another man.”

Jor smiles, eyes sly. “Nianne says you might not have to do much askin’.”

Jame groans. “This is the heart of gossip through the whole camp, isn’t it?”

Jor snickers and Jame feels flushed, embarrassed by the attention but feeling like he fits, like he’s getting the brotherly teasing he should have had years ago. The hopeful anticipation of a rite of passage that he had dreaded the last time it was upon him. 

“Soon,” Jame says again, not quite sure if he means it.

 

=============  
Lenora comes for Tye as he’s scooping goat shit into a bucket to take up to the plants. It’s not shine work, but it feels like progress. He’s doing better on the new leg. Can put the crutch down in favor of the shovel, manage the few steps between scoops with just the shovel for balance. He likes the way the job is building muscle back in his shoulders, in his thighs. 

He pauses his work and pushes the hair back from his sweaty forehead. It’s growing long enough to flop down and touch his face, but not long enough to get in his eyes. A course dark beard is growing on his jaw. It itches.

“You still want to fight?” Lenora asks.

“Yeah,” Tye says. _Always,_ he thinks.

“Clean up,” she says. “Meet me at your patch.”

She’s wearing her riding leathers, helmet under her arm. His lips quirk at the idea of barking out a “Yes, Imperator,” in reply, but he’s more afraid of her dark looks than any Imperator’s boot, so he just nods.

He rubs the worst of the muck off with clean dry sand and washes the rest off in the water bound for gardening. He limps over, crutch for balance and not support.

There’s a bike at Jame and Jor’s patch. Not much bigger than the battered little scoot that Tye rode on moving day, no more chrome. Not a bit of shine on it anywhere. The shape of it though, the bigger motor slung high in its belly. The angles come together like the green hoppers that plague the pease garden, made for jumping, bouncing. No seat, just a strip of plast to keep the rear wheel from throwing gravel up his back-hole. It wouldn’t have been a war machine back at the Citadel. Nowhere for the driver to sit, never-mind a lancer.

“Didn’t have many with a left kick,” Lenora says, watching him check out his new bike. 

Tye walks around the bike, eyes the posts that are welded on for the leg that Re-Tom made for him. 

“This somebody else’s ride?” he asks. Not that he’ll say no, it’ll just be good to know who he needs to make peace offers to.

Lenora shakes her head. “We had a couple spares. It was banged up, but salvageable.”

Tye nods. This is different than the other things they’ve given him, the bare-necessity things, the have-or-die things. A bike is an investment. The guzz it’ll take him to learn to ride it. The time and loss of his share of the daily work before he’ll be able to take a place on the pass, much less fight there. 

“Switch legs and fire it up,” Lenora says, and when Tye looks over there’s a small smile at the corner of her mouth. 

Tye obeys, sits down on a crate and unbuckles the straps. There’s a moment, when he takes the leg off, when he feels lighter, when his skin can breathe at the end of his leg. He doesn’t have the time to savor it though. Trades out leather and hinges for the short cap that Re-Tom made, protection for his shin that cups around the end. He needs the crutch to get back upright, to get back to the bike. 

Lenora holds out the helmet for him to duck into once he’s astride the bike. He misses a second, frozen at the sense of a trap. War Boys don’t fear death. Don’t fear the afterlife. Anything that stands between them and a glorious end is a waste, is mediocre, is soft. Taking a helmet in the Citadel could only be a trick. A boy who took it would be mocked, jeered, would fall to the bottom of the ranking system.

Tye lowers his head and Lenora slides the helmet on. It’s already hot. Heavy. He loses peripheral vision. It smells of sweat and leather and dry old blood. 

He doesn’t complain.

“You done a kick-start before?” she asks, and Tye nods. It takes some getting used to. He ends up putting his right leg behind him across the bars of the frame where a seat would sit, lifting up using the shinguard and kicking down with his good leg. The motor catches on the third try, a stronger, throatier roar than the whine of the other bike he’s ridden here. 

Lenora points out the controls, unique quirks of a machine so far patched and rigged and changed that its parts have traveled some.

“Ride on up that way a piece. There’s a spot where the ground’s hard and mostly flat.” 

Tye nods, feeling the weight of the helmet shift and settle on his head. He thinks he knows the stretch she means, remembers it from moving day. He gives the bike some gas, feels it jump between his knees, surging up like a living thing, like the pulse of war, of ruttin’, of life. He keeps it slow through camp and just a little faster once he’s out of it. 

He’s not sure what he hits. Isn’t going fast enough to throw him, but the rear wheel jerks, wobbles and slips out from under him and he hauls right so the bike falls left, boot coming down to keep it from falling over as he brakes. 

He looks back. Has to tilt his head to get the offending rock into the part of the visor he can see through. Takes three deep breaths echoing in the face mask. Keepers wear helmets. Tye can wear a helmet. He tips it back off of his head and spits on the ground. Shamed to waste water but he can’t make his throat swallow it. He takes a few deep breaths of good air and then jams the helmet back down, its leather and cord mane brushing his back, his shoulders.

Lenora catches him a few rig-lengths further down the cut, helmet on, the low wide body of her bike under her. Comes up beside him so he knows she’s there and then drops back, following. When they get to the place she wants him she speeds around him again, pulls up and gestures for him to make some laps of the space. 

Tye does as he’s told, left turns so he can put his foot down if his lean gets too low. She lets him run a while and then changes the gesture to a figure-8. Trickier, but he’s feeling smoother and he doesn’t drop the bike doing his right turns. She doesn’t signal him to quit, but he pulls to a shaky stop. Has to pull the helmet off again and fecking breathe before he drops. 

She waits, and Tye stands until his heart quiets down, until his lungs are as loose as they’re gonna get. He jams the helmet back on and she signals a return to camp. Leads the way and he follows. This can’t be the end, he thinks. Can’t be he’s done so bad they junk the whole idea of him doin’ war with them. 

She stops at the patch where they started from and cuts the engine, takes off her helmet and shakes loose her silver braid. Watches him as he pulls his off and takes a few long breaths, trying not to make a show of it. 

“Problem?” she asks, and he shakes his head. 

She props her bike up on the kickstand and strides over to him, takes his chin in her bony hand. He doesn’t fight her when she tips his face. 

“Tell me the problem,” she says, and he can see the war-leader in her, the steel in her bones. 

“Never. Never worn a helmet before,” he says. “Can’t breathe, all closed in. Can’t see.” The thought of wearing the bulky weight of armor and leathers all over and around his body like Jame and Jor do makes his skin creep. 

Lenora lets him go, helps him get his bike set so he can climb off. Guides him the two hops to where he left his leg. She’s quiet, and he doesn’t know what it means. If he’s wiped out already. If he’s back to being useless junk.

“I don’t reckon I know for sure, the why of Citadel folk not gearing up proper for fightin’,” she starts, slow and thoughtful. “Mebbe it’s that any fall out there’s gonna finish you anyways, or near enough to not matter. Mebbe it’s to make you skull-boys think dyin’ ain’t a thing to put off long as a person can.”

Tye takes the cap off of his leg and massages the scar, sore from his ride. His knees are tired, his thighs burning. 

“Up here, you’re gonna fall,” she says. “Everybody falls. There’s no mercy in the rocks, no sand to catch you. Keepers get banged up, broken, even with all the gear you can carry. Heads worst of all. Easiest to break, worst when they do. Ridin’ without a helmet isn’t an option.”

He nods, presses his lips together. “I’ll learn,” he’s quick to say. “I’ll get used to it.”

She takes the helmet up from where he laid it on one of the crates that marks Jame and Jor’s patch. 

“I’ll see if I can find something with less bulk. Maybe less close on your face.”

He wants to go to his knees in gratitude, wants to raise his hands in the shape of the V8 for her mercy. He struggles to think the way they do it here. 

“Thanks, boss,” he says, but he can’t raise his eyes to her. “I won’t let you down.”


	16. Chapter 16

Tye rides, learns his new balance on the little hills and flats of his practice area. Eloc comes, riding the smallest bike Tye’s ever seen, but it’s not shy of power. Lenora points them the way of building some ramps and Tye puts back even more muscle, shoveling sand and moving rock. 

Lenora comes with them to watch their ride. Directs them on the moves and directions she wants them to go with hand motions, simple signals that become more complex. She takes Tye’s helmet and replaces it with a modular set-up, goggles and helmet in two pieces. He wears them one at a time for a stretch and then both. Together, it still makes it hard to catch a breath but he does it. Lets her try armor on him until she’s happy with the fit of it, straps and plates against his bare skin. She doesn’t try throwin’ leather over it.

Four-Finger Dan makes them empty bombs, clay balls they can practice throwing and dropping, aiming at marks on the ground or the windows of gutted-out shells of vehicles. 

He goes to sleep exhausted, wakes up with his missing foot aching. He can’t remember feelin’ this before. Feelin’ hope.

Fighters come from the pass on their three days rest, men and a few women comin’ down one at a time. People that never had much of a use for Tye start givin’ him their time. Pointing him a better way to ride, to move, to hit the ramps. 

Couple times, a woman comes to him in the shroud. The first time he can’t breathe, can’t even swallow. Just shakes his head and she chooses another. The next are easier now that he knows how to. He wishes they’d stop. Doesn’t know why they’d want to try when he’s sure to be mediocre.

Re-Tom brings a third leg for Tye to try, a pivot-joint under the leg-cap like Jor thought, a straight bar that goes down and ends in a melted lump of tire rubber to get good grim under him. He practices that. 

Nianne calls him over, one night after last-meal. Gives him a small tin jar with a screw-on lid. He glances at her and then opens it. Pale gray inside. He touches it with his fingertip and it dabs off on him smooth and cold. His heart skips a gear. Paint. They’re giving him paint. 

“Lenora says wearin’ leathers isn’t workin’ for you, so put this wherever you’re burning when you go out in the sun. Shoulders and chest. Wherever’s goin’ red.”

He nods, and waits for a dismissal, but she’s still lookin’ at him. Weighin’ him. 

“How’s your lumps?” she asks, softer. He resists the urge to cover that spot between abdomen and hip where the two grow, one the size of the pad of his thumb, the other half that size.

“Same,” he says. The Organic Mechanic back at the Citadel would take that as good news and send him on his way. 

“Doesn’t bother you?” Nianne asks instead. “Doesn’t rub while you’re riding or when you were fightin’ the Spiker?” 

He shakes his head. It is what it is, like the foot or the fresh scars from the fight. 

She watches him and he waits, half-afraid to move for fear of her changing her mind and decidin’ he isn’t fit for the pass. 

“I’d like to see them,” she says. Still watchin’. 

That he can do, and he stands, unbuckles his trousers with quick efficiency and drops them to his knees.

Nianne turns her head from the sight, puts her hand up between her and Tye’s piston. Growls In frustration and he doesn’t ken what he did wrong. 

“Over there,” she points to some bedding laid out where the light’s best. Throws him a square of cloth. “Lay down, put that thing away and I’ll be there in a second.”

Tye pulls his pants up again because walking is high-skill work even without the cloth tanglin’ up around his legs. Goes where she pointed and takes them down again, his back to her. Lays himself out and puts the cloth to cover everything that dangles. 

“Thank you,” Nianne says as she comes to him, sets down beside him. Hovers her hands over his bumps until he nods for her to do what she’s gonna do. 

Her fingertips are cool on his skin, pressing in around the bumps, gently pushing them to the side. She works out from there, walking her hands along, feeling what’s under his skin. He doesn’t like it. His defects on display. She finally sits back and tells him “Get dressed again.” Turns her back so he can pull his pants back up.

“Are you having any other symptoms?” She asks when he’s done. “Night fevers? Shakes?” 

“No.”

She nods. “The ‘bumps’ haven’t changed size or shape since you came here.” He figures she must a checked when he was dark after losin’ his leg. “If you’re not having any other problems, I’m tempted to think this ‘half-life’ business is environmental. Somethin’ bad at that Citadel makin’ them sick.”

“So…I can fight?” Tye asks, tryin’ to work out why it matters. 

“You can fight,” Nianne says, a hum of regret in her words. 

He’s back at Jame and Jor’s patch before he remembers that he never told her about his glitches. For just a tic he feels the sting of betrayal, but. Jame and Jor looking out for him. It wasn’t the same as spreadin’ word of a weak link’s bum hip or a torn shoulder-muscle to get an Imperator’s sight line. Wasn’t jockeying for position and favor. Just makin’ sure he’s runnin’ fine. Makin’ sure he’s tuned up right. 

He goes to sleep feelin’ like a tool left careful in its place. Oiled and ready when it’s needed. 

==========

The caravan is small, coming down the pass from the east--one lumbering truck overloaded with trade goods, two small gunners and a road-bike. Five fighters, plus whoever is on the truck. Lenora and Kell and a few others accompany them from Raig’s care to Jame’s, running the tops of the hills, indistinguishable from the actual warriors by the distance and their leathers. 

Jame jumps the pass and then rides a low ramp down, crossing the sand and coming to a stop in front of the lead vehicle. He doesn’t know what Raig charged them for the toll, but they don’t seem sullen, just the normal amount of nervous. 

“Who leads you?” Jame asks, and the passenger of the front car stands up between the roll-bars. Glances down to the driver. Not the leader, but willing to take the shot if Jame has bad intentions.

“There’s Buzzards in the dunes,” he says. “Best wait ‘til nightfall and then go. Head west and you’ll hit the Fury Road sure enough.” 

The ‘leader’ looks down again and then nods. “Appreciate the advice. Any charge for waiting in the pass until dark?”

Jame shakes his head. They need commerce to start flowing again. Dead travelers won’t help with that.

“You coming back this way?” he asks. 

“Could be,” the trader answers, closed and wary.

Jame nods, big enough to show the motion even with his head covered by helmet. 

“We’ll take news as your toll for passage back, if you do. Solid intel. Who’s in charge at the Citadel. Bullet Farm and Gas Town too.” 

The leader looks down to whoever he’s taking orders from and then nods. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Jame nods once more and then guns his bike back up the ramp. They watch over the caravan, see them set up a light camp in the shade of an outcrop of rock. Watch them until the sun stretches out. Coming from the east, the dark of night will hide their dust trail. They might make it without the Buzzards even knowing they’re there. 

 

==========


	17. Chapter 17

Tye plants the rubbered end of his right leg. Leans in and pivots the bike around him. Straightens again and fangs it up the next hill, hits the jump just right, tires spinning in the air. He’s getting better. Seein’ in the goggles. Learnin’ the ramps and hills he and Eloc have built. It’s like bein’ two places at once, his body _here_ , balance and speed. His mind is ahead, making sure he’s right for the next turn, the next jump. 

He knows he’s not perfect, not strong, but edgin’ past mediocre finally finally.

He finishes his run and there’s a man there at the end of the practice run, standin’ by Eloc and watchin’ Tye. Makes the gesture for ‘wrap it up and bring it in.’

Tye grins behind his face-guard, rides over close as he can without throwin’ gravel. 

Jame is all cleaned up for camp, cheeks smooth and the sides of his hair clipped down short, the top longer and loose. He watches Tye come in, weighin’ his run, watchin’ everything about how he rides. He doesn’t smile, just makes a thoughtful nod and Tye hopes that means Jame thinks as much about Tye’s progress as he does. 

“Looks good,” Jame says over the rattle of Tye’s engine. Waves him on to the patch where Tye’s been sleeping, breaks off and heads for Lenora himself. 

Tye goes and parks his bike, sits and starts undoing the buckles of his leg. Hisses when the straps come off, all the pinches in his skin comin’ alive and angry. The missing foot tingles, itches between his toes that’ll never get scratched. 

“Tye,” Nianne says, joinin’ him there by his bike. “Here.” She passes over a bundle of soft cloth. The shroud. Tye feels a burn go up his face, excitement and anticipation and nerves all at once. Jame is in camp. Tye might finally get a taste.

She adds a small jar, like the one his new paint is in, to the top of the bundle. “Use this if you need it. Be safe, make sure neither a you gets hurt,” she says. Stands to go. “Oh, and tonight’s better than waitin’. You’ll be busy tomorrow and no guarantees Jame will be in camp past that.”

She walks away and Tye opens the little jar. Looks at the something wet inside. Dips a finger and it’s cool, slick, almost clear. Holds it up to the light and there’s a tinge of green in it. Doesn’t smell like much. Taste is like the color— like nothing with a little green in it. He’s not sure what she wants him to do with it, and he sure won’t have a pocket come the time. He pulls his crutch over and makes a half-pouch out of a scrap of soft leather, ties it on under the cross-bar. 

Eloc comes then. “Jame has news. Wants you to come sit with Lenora. See what you think of it.” He hands Tye the best leg for walking, the one with the curved metal for a foot and Tye slips it on, buckles it over the trouser cloth that is still damp with sweat. He stands up, his thigh muscles tight from the ride, the scar feeling raw even though it don’t look bad. He could a sat a while longer, but he ain’t leavin’ those two waitin’ for him. The shroud is still on his lap and Eloc watches with wide eyes as Tye finds a crate with some room to stow it in. 

“Yeah, okay, which way?”

Eloc heads for Lenora’s patch, in the middle of the camp, close to the people and problems that could pop up. Folk are bustling around, going about their chores, but most a them have an ear turned to the meeting. 

Lenora gestures Tye to a bench and he sits, makin’ the fourth corner of a square, Jame, Lenora and Kell on the other three. He feels wound up with the anticipation of it, thoughts spinnin’ wonderin’ what Jame coulda heard that has anything to do with him. 

“I offered to trade news for passage with a caravan, twenty days back,” Jame starts, low and serious. “They said some things about the Citadel. How it is there now.”

He’s watching Tye so Tye nods and says “Yeah, copy,” because he hears the words and he’s sure he’ll catch why he’s here as Jame goes on.

“Looks like the War Rig that came through had stole Joe’s wives. Or they stole themselves and the Rig too. Couple different stories on that.”

Tye’d known about the wives. At the time he didn’t quite believe all that fuss over a couple breeders.

“Anyway, they came back through us, wrecked Joe’s crew in the pass and went on to take the Citadel. There was trouble, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm sendin’ what they had left to try to take it, but the Citadel just pulled all their folk off the ground. Left nobody to shoot and nothin’ to eat.”

That, Tye can imagine. The swath of sand and stone already picked clean by the wretched masses living at the foot of the rocks. Ain’t much of a siege if the folk inside have more to go on than those that are outside.

“The failed attack set off a couple changes of leadership, and the Citadel has treaties workin’ now with the new heads. Cooperation. Patrol on the Fury Road. The traders said a war party came out to meet them, see them safe to the shade of the Citadel.”

“Imperator Furiosa?” Tye asks.

“The traders weren’t sure. Sounds like there’s a council. Wives become sisters runnin’ the place. Furiosa’s supposed to serve them, but she runs what’s left of the skull-boys an’ don’t seem like much gets done without her nod.”

“It sound like it could be true?” Lenora asks Tye.

Tye shrugs, tryin’ to imagine it. “Yeah. I mean. I can see it fallin’ together that way. They said there’s still War Boys?”

Jame nods. “That part they didn’t have to ask about. Seen them on the patrol that brought them in.”

Tye reckons that’s good. That he can image it in his head that the few he had any thought for were still alive. Still runnin’. Boys he’d rutted with and them that helped him when he was young and needed teachin’. Furiosa’s crew always seemed to come back whole more often than not. Until she traitored them.

“What does this mean for us?” Lenora asks.

Jame lets out a heavy sigh. “No way of tellin’. Could be they’ll stay in their territory. If they’re protectin’ trade, it could push the spikers our way more. Could be they get a spark to take the pass, run it themselves without havin’ to pay tolls.” 

Tye wets his lower lip and figures if they didn’t want him to talk they wouldn’t have him sittin’ with them. “Last time, they fanged out of the garage without much of a plan. Figured on catchin’ the rig before the mountains. If they think it out, armor up against the way we fight…”

“We’ll make them pay for every inch with blood,” Jame promises, “but even as deep as we cut them the last time, they’ve got numbers we couldn’t match if we put every body that can sit a bike out on the pass.”

“So we negotiate?” Kell asks. Lenora hums. 

“I’ll send your word with the next caravan,” Jame says, eyes on Lenora. “See if we can make it not worth fightin’ for something they could get cheaper.”

Lenora nods. Kell and Jame stand. Tye figures the meeting is over and starts gettin’ himself up too, but Lenora reaches for his arm and he sits again. Her cool hands are strong on his wrist and he doesn’t pull away. Tries not to breathe. He can hear Kell and Jame stepping away.

She looks at him. Stares into the heart of him. 

Finally she smiles and pats his hand. “Let the man get some dinner first. He’ll need his strength.”


	18. Chapter 18

Tye watches Jame through last-meal of the day, and if he’d feel half a pup doing it, he’s reassured by Jame watchin’ him back. They don’t sit together. Jame still talkin’ with Lenora and Kell about whatever peace they’re wanting to offer the Imperator who took life from half their fighters. 

Eloc sits close by Tye, spilling words that Tye doesn’t feel a deep responsibility to answer. 

Tye puts a rush on finishing off his food and reckons Jame is far enough into his own that he’ll be done before Tye gets back. 

“Hey,” he murmurs to Eloc. “You make sure he don’t leave, copy?” It’s the best way he can come up with to make sure Eloc doesn’t follow him to his patch and interrupt his gettin’ into the shroud.

Eloc nods, taking the job serious, and Tye levers himself up, walks away from the dinner-circle without usin’ his crutch at all. Been a while since he’s tucked it under his arm and he thinks maybe he’ll see if somebody can find him more of a tall pole to use.

He goes to the spot he’d laid out spare bedding. Lights the oil lantern there and makes sure no scorpions have slipped in between the leathers while they were sittin’ out. Goes back to his place and opens the crate and feels over the soft cloth of the shroud. He hadn’t thought much about the logistics of going to Jame beyond deciding to bring the crutch to balance with if he takes a step wrong. Better to acknowledge he’s not as chrome as he used to be than to bite off more than he can swallow and shame himself falling over. 

He flips the shroud over his head. It smells faint of sweat and sex. Soft on the bare skin of his shoulders. The fabric is thin enough, fine enough, that he can see shapes and shadows. Can tell one box of Jame’s gear from another. Figures it’ll be good enough sight to make his offer to the right person at least. He’s got the spot laid out around a bend of the canyon. He’s done all he can to make it work. He figures Nianne and Lenora both wouldn’t steer him wrong. He takes his time, unfastening his leg, taking off his trousers and putting the leg back on. 

He stands and takes a deep breath. Feels his heart rev in his chest. Findin’ another body to rut against has never felt so much like going to war. Never felt so important. 

He turns towards the fading glow of the cook-fire and takes the first step. 

============

Jame knows Tye is coming, and the knowing of it doesn’t help at all with seeing of it. Seeing the shrouded figure. His feet are hidden in shadows, but Jame can see the familiar limp, the outline of the crutch’s top through the gauze. He sits, frozen. Other folk are watchin’. There’s usually a quiet when a shrouded is walking. Every man hoping it’s him, but everybody knows who this one is for. The shrouded comes to him, slow careful steps that stop just out of reach. Jame looks up, waits, and the shrouded offers a hand. 

Jame leans up, reaches and takes the hand, gripping with the cloth between them. Lets himself be pulled to his feet. He’s dizzy with the pound of his heart, with anticipation. The shadow of doubt curls around the edges, that he won’t be good enough at it to warrant a second ride. That he’ll be displeasing in his inexperience. 

“Yeah?” his rider asks. Tye, Tye’s voice. 

“Yes,” Jame breathes, and the people around are watchin’. Somebody makes a sound like air squeezin’ out of a tire and Jame thinks his face is like to catch fire if Tye doesn’t get him out of here soon. 

Tye leads him out of the circle, across the sands and down the cut a ways. The night goes quiet enough around them that Jame can hear the squeak of leather in the brace, the scrape of gravel against the metal foot. He can hear Tye breathin’. Feel the warmth of his hand through the cloth. 

They turn the corner and there’s a spot laid out, a single oil lantern flickering in the darkness, leathers spread out for them to lay on. Tye lets go of his hand and Jame is quick to strip his shirt off over his head, to unbuckle his boots and kick them aside, to slip out of his trousers. 

“Feck,” Tye sighs, pleased-like and Jame gets more confident as he lays down on the leathers, as he stretches his body. His piston rises, ready for whatever use Tye wants to put it to. 

Tye drops the crutch off to the side and steps over him. Jame wants to touch, wants to run his hands up the bare shins he can’t see but he doesn’t want to put Tye’s balance off. He waits, and Tye crouches, awkward for a second and then falls the few inches to the knee of his better leg. Skin brushes, the inside of Tye’s thighs against the outsides of Jame’s. The drag and scrape of leather from the straps above Tye’s knee. 

Jame’s hands float, and Tye fluffs the edge of the shroud over them, invites Jame in. He rests his palms on the strong muscles of Tye’s thighs, feels the power contained. Looks up into the featureless shadows, unable to see Tye’s reaction. Forced to feel it in his skin, listen for it in the hitch of his breath. 

Tye’s hand reaches down and touches Jame too. Rests on the flat of his belly and slides up to the middle of his chest. He has callouses, from the work he’s been doin’ in camp. His hand is broad, strong. Pauses at Jame’s navel and then slips lower, palm brushing his stick, making it jump at the contact. Jame’s breath sounds loud in his own ears. He slides his own hands towards each other. His left hand runs into a shape under Tye’s skin at the point of his hip, a bump the size of his thumb-knuckle. Jame flinches away. 

“It don’t hurt,” Tye says, takes Jame’s hands and puts them back where he wants them, sliding them towards each other. Jame feels wiry, curly hair against his thumbs. A little more and there’s Tye’s stick. He shivers. Thinks he might spark just from this, from touchin’ something so fine. 

Tye leans down and the cloth falls against Jame’s face, enfolding his sight in white. The lantern flickers. Tye’s hips shift, their pistons glancing against each other. He hunches down, trying to find an angle, to find a rhythm. The metal of his foot scrapes down the side of Jame’s calf but he’s too hot for it to register as pain. 

“Feck,” Tye says again, growls in frustration. “Wait, just…” He shifts to his left and both hands leave Jame’s body as he grabs at his thigh, unbuckling the straps. Jame pants, waiting. He stills his hands but can’t bear to take them off Tye’s skin. He can see Tye tangle in the shroud, lift the edge and toss the leg out of their way. Tye leans in again and the shroud settles against Jame’s face. 

Tye’s makes another aggravated grumble and Jame doesn’t want it to end this way, wants Tye to be happy enough to do this again. To do it over and over again. He strokes Tye’s shaft and Tye thrusts against his fingers. Jame isn’t sure exactly what should be happening, but it doesn’t seem enough, at least not for Tye. May as well be his own hand, maybe, Jame thinks. He goes still. The two of them pant at each other from opposite sides of the shroud.

“Can I. Can I take this thing off?” Tye asks. 

“Of course,” Jame says. “You can. Whatever you want. However you want it.” He wonders if anybody told him, what it would mean for a woman to join to a man without it. The trust Tye’d be puttin’ that Jame won’t go jealous or slackin’. He can’t find the words though. Can’t find the words for much of anything, but he swears to himself he’ll earn that trust. To learn Tye’s pleasure and how to give it.

Tye pauses for a beat and then flips the shroud off. His hair is damp around the edges, his cheeks flushed in the flickering light of the lantern. The sheen glows on the lines of his scars, and Jame reaches up, finally touches, feeling the ridges under his fingertips. 

“Tye,” he whispers, because even though he had no doubt who was against him, it wouldn’t have been right to say his name before this moment.

“I never done this layin’ down,” Tye says, nerves in his voice. Like he’s the one afraid of it going sideways. 

Jame reaches up and cups his fingers around Tye’s skull, his ear in the V of Jame’s thumb and Tye leans in, closes his eyes. Slows down his frustrated thrusts into a slower roll. It’s better. 

“How would it be?” Jame asks, “If we were standin’ up?”

Tye leans down against Jame, chest to chest. Shifts off to the side and slots his leg in the space between Jame’s. 

“Yeah,” Tye pants, and yeah, Jame pushes up against the hollow of Tye’s pelvis. Tye pushes his face against Jame’s cheekbone. Presses his teeth in against Jame’s jaw. Against the scar he made, the lump where Jame lost a chip of bone. Not biting, just letting Jame feel the hard edge of his teeth. He grabs at Jame’s hip, keeps him close, his own shaft grindin’ against Jame’s hip.

“I’m gonna…” Jame gasps. It shouldn’t be so much better than doing this alone but it is, gettin’ him close. Too soon, knows all the men say that lastin’ is important. Makin’ sure their rider gets there before they do, but he’s not gonna be able to stop. 

Tye shifts and Jame gives one last thrust into the air before he can calm himself. Grits his teeth and stares at the stars to give himself a moment. Tye looks down at him, smiles the same grin he’d had after killin’ the Spiker. Predatory. Keeps eye contact as he scoots down, leans in and flicks his tongue at Jame’s nipple. 

Jame jumps, a part of his body he’d never associated with ruttin’ suddenly added to the circuit. Tye smiles and does it again, grazes his teeth over the sensitive skin, the rough of his beard on that part of Jame’s body equally new. Slithers back some more and mouths at Jame’s waist, just above his hip bone. It tickles. Tickles and makes his stick throb with wantin’. Tye’s mouth so hot and wet right there. 

Tye’s wicked smile fades then; his face goes serious and intent. He lowers his head. Breathes over the knob of Jame’s stick where it’s pushed out of it’s sheath. Jame groans, grips his hands tight to keep from pushin’, from takin’ more than is on offer. Tye circles the base of Jame’s stick with one hand, holds it steady and puts his mouth on it. Puts some suction on it and draws it in against his tongue. 

“Please,” Jame gasps. Not sure if he’s begging Tye to stop, to let Jame have more of a chance to please him or if he wants Tye to finish him off. 

And then Tye moans, like this is revvin’ his motor, doin’ pleasure on Jame’s body. The vibration of it rumbles through Jame’s stick, down to his nuts and spark comes back up, pulsing from Jame’s shaft and into Tye’s mouth. 

Tye swallows it, drinks it down like a man come in from the sand drinks water. 

When Jame is done, Tye lets his stick slip from his lips. Licks him clean and then crawls back up his body. 

Jame cups his hand around the back a Tye’s neck again. Wants to ask what to do. Wants to offer but he doesn’t know what or how. 

Tye thrusts his stick against Jame’s thigh. Head down as he concentrates on findin’ his own pleasure. “Yeah. Yeah. Copy. Oh feck.” His wind catches and he goes silent as he finds his own spark, wet and hot against Jame’s skin. He sags down, goes lax and Jame can almost hear him ticking down like a hot engine turned off but still alive. He breathes against Jame’s cheek and then reaches unsteady down, scoops his seed off Jame’s hip and brings his hand up between them. 

“You want?” he offers, and Jame never has. Never thought there was a reason to taste his own and never had the chance to taste anybody else’s. He closes his lips over Tye’s finger. It tastes bitter, salty, thick on his tongue. Tye watches him like it’s near enough to get him goin’ again and Jame feels proud, that he has done it right. Sucks on Tye’s fingers like Tye had sucked his stick. 

Tye smiles, soft now, and puts his head down on Jame’s shoulder, fingertips playing over Jame’s lips. Jame touches the pattern of scars over Tye’s shoulder, fine-cut gears and pistons. Reaches up to grace the back of his knuckles over the still-pale ones the Spiker cut on his face. They lay there together as the night grows cool, the sand under their bedding warm from the sunlight. The sounds of camp filter out to them, relaxed and happy, people talking, a drum circle starting. 

He wishes he’d done more for Tye’s pleasure, but Tye don’t seem disappointed. Doesn’t seem unfulfilled. He thinks next time he’ll ask Nianne if he can use the shroud. Try that thing with his mouth that Tye did so well. 

Jame pulls the corner of the sewn-together goatskins over them, puttin’ off the time they need to head back to their patch as long as he can. 

“What comes next?” Tye asks in the quiet. “The time I got rode, she left first. Do I…” 

Jame shrugs under him. “Up to you. You can put the shroud back on, or wrap up in the bedding and walk down. I go when you want me gone.”

“Back to your patch,” Tye confirms, like there’s another question there too. “Our patch.”

Jame reckons it is. His and Jor’s sure, but Tye’s been usin’ it more than both of them put together. 

Jame licks his lips. “Yeah. Our patch. Unless you want to go somewhere else. Or don’t want me there.”

“I’ve never gone to sleep with anybody I done this with,” Tye says, soft and unsure. Jame is honored to be the one Tye goes quiet with. The one Tye lets see under the paint and the armor and the savage grin.

“Me either,” Jame says, lips twitchin’. 

Tye huffs against his collar bone. Jame squirms but not too hard. 

“We go down there, we’re like to wake up covered in pups,” Tye warns. 

“Reckon I’ll take that risk,” Jame answers and Tye sits up, slow hand lingerin’ like he’s in no hurry to be apart either. 

==============================

Twenty feet down the cut, one small figure waves signal to another that’s closer to camp, a flash of white cloth fluttering in the starlight. The second waves to a third and the third grabs what they came for from a patch that isn’t theirs. Helmet, treasures, sparklies. Grabbin’ it all up and fluffin’ the rest of the gear that’s supposed to be there so it don’t look like nothin’s missin’.

Bare feet scurry in the dark, running away. They’re gone before Jame and Tye come down the path. Jame carries Tye’s crutch in one hand, the shroud thrown over his shoulder. Tye leans in on him as they walk, wrapped in leather and shadows and nothin’ else.


	19. Chapter 19

Tye wakes up curled up against Jame’s back. Against his warmth and the soft motion of his breath. It’s no different than the way he woke up with Jor, last time he was the one in camp, but it kicks Tye’s chest the way Jor hadn’t. More. Everything is more with Jame. Talking or work. Ruttin’. Even fighting him, trying to take the life out a him, is bright in Tye’s memory like lightening across the sky. 

Not much in Tye’s life has been chrome like this. This shine moment of quiet, the faint sounds of people asleep. The few up and cooking first meal. Goats being herded out to graze. He thinks Jame is still sleeping and he feels free. Bold. He lifts his arm and Jame doesn’t move. Reaches out and slowly rests his hands along Jame’s side, over his lower ribs. 

Jame sighs in his sleep and half rolls over, puts a hand over Tye’s. 

Tye doesn’t go back to sleep, but he doesn’t move until later, the sky notably brighter. Doesn’t move until Jame blinks awake. Smiles soft and sleepy at him and leans in until their foreheads touch. 

It’s not much longer until the morning’s cook calls the meal is ready. Jame sighs and goes to sit up. Tye looks around and is fair surprised they’re alone in the patch—none a the pups joinin’ them in the night. 

They get up. Jame waits for him to get his leg on and then they go to join the camp at the cook-fire. Jame sits with him as they eat millet mush and drink thick white yogurt.

A bike comes in as they’re eating. Jame raises his head and juts his chin in greeting. Don’t seem surprised or wary as Raig pulls off his helmet and walks bowlegged over to them. Jame refills his own bowl and passes it to Raig. Gets another for himself. 

Raig eats and watches Tye. Looking him over like he’s a bike. 

“He’s put on good weight,” Raig says at last.

Jame nods. “Nianne says he’s fit.”

Tye mebbe sits a little taller. Rolls his shoulders back to make his chest look bigger.

“We’re gonna ride today,” Jame says to Tye. “Me an’ you an’ Raig. See how you’re coming. If you’re solid enough a rider to be on the pass.”

Tye swallows and nods. Tries not to show his nerves. He’s been workin’ hard, and he doesn’t have to be the most shine, Lenora told him, just as good as the worst of the fighters already out there. He thinks he can do that. He scrapes the last of his meal out of his bowl and gets a cup of water from the well-fresh bucket. Only smart to take every scrap of advantage he can.

Raig takes his bike and heads to the training area after they’re done eating. Tye and Jame go back to their patch. Tye switches out his legs, careful with the fit of it, makin’ sure every strap is tight as it should be, that there’s no wrinkle in his pants leg gonna be a distraction later. Buckles on the pads and armor, smears paint in the gaps where his skin shows to the sun. He watches Jame get ready too, pullin’ on layers more than Tye, heavy leathers that hide his shape, make him look part of the rocks. Jame pulls his helmet on and Tye misses the show of his face, misses seeing it even though his mask is almost as much Jame to him as without it. 

Jame gets on his bike and waits and Tye is ready. Reaches for his helmet and…it’s not there. 

“The feck?” he turns a circle, looking for where it could be, but the patch isn’t that big and he’d have remembered putting it away. 

Jame tips his helmet back off his face. 

“Helmet’s gone,” Tye says, stomach twisting. He’d thought. Thought he didn’t have to guard his gear here. That everybody was better when people have what they need for their work. The goggles are right there, right where he left the helmet. He can’t figure why anybody would take it, when they’d get seen wearing it. 

He expects Jame angry, a bit a prime gear like that missing, but he huffs a laugh, shakes his head. Puts his fingers to lips and sends out a sharp whistle through the camp. 

Everybody close enough to hear it turns to look. 

“He needs it to ride,” Jame says like somebody is bein’ slow-headed. 

A pack of the pups shuffle around. Catch Jame’s attention and he stares them down.

“It’s not done,” one of the older ones says, chin up and defiant. 

Jame’s mouth curves as he fights a smile. 

“Let him use it now an’ you can work on it more after.”

The pups seem unhappy but the spokesperson digs under a tented-up piece of leather and comes out with Tye’s helmet. They got it stripped of most a the frills and dangles it had, looking like a naked thing with the scuffed shell of it showing. The pup runs it over and Tye checks the inside padding and then puts it on. 

Jame ruffles the pup’s hair and sends them back to where they were. Gives the hand-sign for ‘that way, no rush, you go first” and Tye kicks the motor of his bike, feels it rev healthy and strong between his knees, leads the way out. 

================

Jame pushes. Sendin’ the three of them up and back in the area Tye’s been working. Pushes the ride to the very limits of how long Nianne said Tye could keep wearing the same leg at a stretch. Pushes Tye and Raig to mesh together as they criss-cross the short run. 

He isn’t bad. Not good as Jame or Jor. Limits on how high his jumps can be else he comes down hard on that leg, risks his balance. 

Once, Tye hits the gravel and the wheels go out from under him. Jame can only watch as he brings his arms in front and rolls with it. Comes to a stop with his thumb in the air. He’s gotta be scratched up, and if Lenora hadn’t told him about Tye looking near to sick with too much gear on him Jame would insist he get riding leathers. He watches, and Tye gets up. Looks like the pads took the worst of it. Jame gives the ‘do it again’ sign. Tye scrabbles to the fallen bike on three limbs, not bothering to use an unsuitable leg on the loose rock. Gets his wheels under him and goes again. 

Raig comes in, parks beside Jame and lifts his helmet back on his head. Dark eyes watch Tye. 

“Reckon he’d make that run until he drops or you tell him stop,” Raig says. Tye follows the trail back and Jame sends him up the west slope again. 

Raig snorts. “You hopin’ he’ll falter or he’ll go on forever?” 

Jame watches Tye. Sends him over the east side, watches him catch air in the jump. Land sure and steady. 

“I gotta know he’s strong,” Jame says. 

Raig hums his thoughts out. Rubs his grizzled jaw. “Not saying he’s the best now he can ever be, but he’s good enough, and he can jag around out there as easy as here. Better with other riders to show him. Push him.”

Jame sighs and gives Tye the ‘wrap it up and go back’ signal. Tye pops his bike up on its back wheel as he goes, flashin’ that he’s not too worn to show off.

“Jame,” Raig says, serious. “I ain’t gonna wreck him for no reason, and I don’t see no reason. You being made war chief, that’s done. You takin’ him in when I’d a put a hole in him, that worked out pretty solid too. The rest of my camp’s met him. If there’s gonna be a problem, I can’t see it on the horizon.”

And Jame hadn’t _thought_ Raig would take out whatever loss of station he might a blamed Jame for on Tye, but it helps, hearing it. 

“Watch out for him,” Jame says. “Get him into the dealing for passage. Let him see the works of it.”

Raig nods. Doesn’t question the reasons. 

“We done? I’ll head back to east camp; I’m takin’ a day here that I promised to Iring. Unless you need somethin’ more,” Raig says, and Jame shakes his head. 

“Nah. I’ll send him up tomorrow, mebbe the next day.”

Raig pushes his helmet down again, turns his back on Jame and heads down the slope. 

 

==================


	20. Chapter 20

Jame pushes. Riding hard with Tye and Raig and then sending Tye up over the same hills time and again. Tye’s glad for the helmet then, to hide the strain on his face as he jolts over the bumps, knees catching the shock. 

Jame pulls off onto a hill and directs Tye and Raig. Quick hand signals for different orders, different directions. They work, weaving their paths together. Syncing their jumps. 

Jame calls Raig up to him and sends Tye down the run again while the two watch.

Tye figures mebbe Jame is tryin’ him. To see if it’s body or will that breaks first. He revs the bike’s engine. Feels it thrumming through his joints. Puts an extra height on the next jump. If Jame is gonna test him to failure, Tye trusts Jame to put him back together again. 

He rides. His world narrows. Keeps a eye on Jame. The rest of him focused on the ride. Back. Again. Up the other side. Jame makes a different sign and Tye’s brain skids on it before he copies that it’s _wrap it up head home_.

He finds just enough juice to make a chrome exit. Rides on his rear wheel until he’s around the bend then puts the front down, slows the engine. His legs ache and he goes to their patch. Gets the bike propped up and half-falls off of it, thighs burning and shaking. Sits and starts rubbing it out. Loosens the straps on the leg, letting circulation come back a little at a time. 

Eloc trots across the camp towards him but Nianne catches him halfway, sends him off a new direction. Comes to Tye herself and sits beside him. 

“How’s the leg?” she asks.

“Good,” Tye says. “Not much sorer than th’ other one.”

Nianne nods and doesn’t ask to see it to check his word. Tye figures it’s more than Jame trusting him more these days. 

“Neither a you looked like you were limping this morning,” Nianne says. “Everything go smooth with the shroud? You used the aloe I gave you?”

Heat flashes up Tye’s jaw and across his cheeks. He’s had more talking about ruttin’ since he’s been with the keepers than his whole life before it. 

“I uh. Couldn’t figure the use of it. Didn’t know what you gave it to me _for_.” He ruffles his sweaty hair, hides behind his arm for a beat so he misses whatever face she makes at that. 

“Tye,” she says, low and warning. “Jeesu, what did you use, spit?”

He swallows hard and tries to think what he coulda done wrong, what woulda left either of them limping. 

“Yeah, some when I had my mouth on him,” he says. 

Nianne pauses whatever it was she was about to say. Starts again. “He didn’t…put his stick in you?” 

Tye blinks. “In my mouth,” he says again, slower, and if he had anything that was _his_ that wasn’t necessary gear he’d trade all of it to get out of this conversation.

“No, I meant…” 

He waits. Wonders if she has this talk with the women who ask for the shroud too. She opens her mouth. Closes it again. 

“If you were both happy with the night, y’all keep doing it that way,” she says. “But if you go more than hands and mouths then you come to me and we’ll talk how it’s done.”

Tye nods, eyes wide and eager to have her stop watching him. “You gonna pass word to Jame or you want me to?” 

“Just make sure he doesn’t go more than hands and mouths without talkin’ to me.”

“Copy,” Tye says, near spooked from how serious she is.

She smiles then, like they didn’t just do this talk. “I’m glad your night went well. If you need the shroud again, just let me know.”

She gets up and leaves, shaking her head but smiling still. 

===================

Tye has all his aches rubbed out by the time Jame comes back alone from the practice spot. 

“Raig’s gone back,” he says, like it matters for Tye to know such a thing. 

Tye looks up at Jame from where he’s sitting and sees the piece of time when Jame’s shoulders come down, when he relaxes his war-stance and gentles his face. 

“How’re you feelin’?” Jame asks.

Tye rolls his eyes. Feels the weird slip of giving disrespect but knowing nobody’s gonna pound him for it. “You ask that of Raig when he was done ridin’?”

Jame’s lips quirk like they had at the pups stealin’ Tye’s helmet.

“Fine then. It’s on you to tell me if you’re injured more than sore from riding. To tell whoever’s the closest boss of you. You don’t and I’ll park you at the Bonesmith’s patch and leave you there.”

It’s so close to the talk he just got out of that Tye almost laughs. “Copy,” he assures Jame too. 

Jame softens even more. “When you’re cooled down, put your leg back on. The one for climbin’ the hills.”

Tye makes a show of flapping the sweat out of his trouser legs. Dries the last of the moisture that gathered under the armor with a scrap of rag. Puts the rubber-tipped leg back on. Jame collects a bundle that Tye hadn’t seen him lay out and offers Tye his hand. If they’re going up the hills, Tye takes his crutch too. Nobody seems to track when he has it and when he goes without anyway.

Jame leads up the crack towards the well and Tye follows behind, steady enough he’s not scared of falling and making a fool of himself. 

Usually there’s a person up there, turnin’ the crank to draw the water up, but today there’s precious guzz running the pump’s motor. Fresh clear water splashes out of the pipe and falls to the trough that brings it down to the goats. Jame trails his fingers through the bright cleanness of it and then cups his hand, brings it to his lips. Nods at Tye to do the same as he drinks. 

Tye drinks, and when he’s done Jame says “Get undressed,” so he sits on a rock and unlaces his boot, unbuckles his straps. Pulls off his pants. It don’t feel like the night before at all. Jame, relaxed but serious, not all heated up like he had been. When Tye’s done stripping down, Jame is bare too, shoulders pale and strangely soft in the light of day, not even scars to cover him. 

Jame starts washing in the trough and Tye scoots over closer and gets handfuls of water, rubs the paint off and cleans the sweat and dirt out of his crevices. Splatters of water soak into the dry rocks. Cools their skin as it evaporates off of them. 

When Tye finishes, Jame is there unrolling his bundle. Shaving blade, leather strop, a tub of what looks like the slick Nianne gave Tye the night before. 

Jame freshens the edge on the blade and steps into Tye’s space. Tye tips his head up on instinct. Of all the things the Citadel and this place have different, this one is the same— a steady hand to take the hair off a him. The one time trust could be given to a peer to not self-promote with a slip of a blade. Jame smears the gel along the upper edge of Tye’s beard and then follows with the steel edge, smooth and careful. Tye closes his eyes against the sun’s glare and lets Jame work. First the beard off of his face and then Jame turns him, puts himself behind. Tips Tye’s head to the side and trims down the sides. Not as close as the beard, but so close all that’s left is fuzz too short to get a pinch of. 

Jame passes Tye his leg when he’s done and Tye puts it on, the both of them still bare to the sun. Jame hands him the blade then and they trade places, Tye standing over Jame, steady hands doing familiar work. 

Tye takes his time. Enjoys the feel of Jame’s cheek under his fingers. The sleek shine of the hair he’s lifting out of the way as he cleans the sides of Jame’s head. 

It’s weird to stop while Jame still has hair on his head, but Tye does, puts the blade away. Jame reaches for Tye’s wrist, pulls him closer, pulls him down until their foreheads touch. They share breath between them and Tye closes his eyes. 

“This marks you as Keeper,” Jame says, and then softer, “This was good.”


	21. Chapter 21

Jame takes a deep breath, rubs the thin cloth of the shroud between finger and thumb, feeling the lightness of it, almost cool somehow. It’s only the third time in his life he’s touched it, and what he’s about to do, it feels unnatural. Obscene. He can’t imagine what the penalty would be if a man took the shroud. Went to a woman like this. Taking the power of the shroud and the power of a man’s strength both. Wonders if the women would drag him down there and then or just do a head count. See who’s missing and come for him later. 

It’s getting dark, and Tye will be done with last-meal soon. Jame tells himself that Nianne wouldn’t have given the shroud to him if it was wrong. Wouldn’t have given Jame more advantage if Tye wasn’t strong as Jame in this, as sure. 

He has one last waver. Caught on what the other men’ll think of him, coming to Tye like he’s the soft one in need of the rules of the shroud to keep him safe. But. Tye musta known too. That the others were thinking the same thing about him they’ll be thinking about Jame. An’ if Tye can give up that hunk of status to come to Jame, then Jame can do no less. 

The shroud is light over his head, delicate on his shoulders. He stands, and begins the longest walk he’s known. Bare feet on sand. Heading for the glow of the fire.

Tye sees him coming and scrambles to stand, grinning already.

“You’re supposed to wait to be chosen,” Jame says, but he’s glad Tye saved him the uncertainty of wondering if he’d say yes. If it was too soon to go again. He can’t pass this up though, can’t wait another twenty days or more until they might be in camp together again. 

Tye looks to where the other folk are still sitting and the men wave him away. With Ria on the pass, it could only be Jame standing so tall under the shroud. Everybody knows who he is and who he’s here for. One of the women, Jenn, gives Jame a warning look, a challenging eyebrow. She has a different mother than him and Jor, but enough of Jor around her eyes that whoever their father was, everybody reckons it was the same for them both. It connects them enough that he ducks his head, nods that he catches the warning. 

Tye takes his hand and Jame leads him off. Leads him to the same spot Tye had set out the night before. They start slower this time. Tye doesn’t look frustrated. 

“Can I take the shroud off?” Jame asks.

“It’s your ride,” Tye says, so Jame does. Likes seeing Tye. They touch, gentle. Like Jame would have if he’d been built for women. There’s no questioning that Tye could take Jame’s strength, his wildness. Could match him fire for fire, but Jame doesn’t want it like that, their last time for a long time. 

They touch. Jame presses his face to Tye’s neck, that place he thought about the day Tye fought the Spiker. Rubs their cheeks together, the rasp of one day’s stubble against each other. Licks his neck and puts his nose in the crease of Tye’s armpit. Breathes in the scent of him, thick and warm. He nuzzles down Tye’s body and does the mouth thing on Tye’s stick. Swallows the taste of Tye’s spark. Sits up and straddles Tye, strokes himself until he spills across Tye’s chest. Leans down and licks it off again.

They lay together for a long while. Long enough that Tye starts touching him again. “Nianne gave me a jar. Slick for us to use.”

They open it. Aloe like Jame had for shaving. Tye pokes a finger in it and touches Jame’s cheek, smooth and cool on his skin. Smiles in soft wonder. 

They play. Like kids chasing each other over the rocks. Carefree and easy. Warmth. Desire builds slow like a storm. Their sticks bob against each other and Jame gets more slick on his fingers. Wraps his hand around both of them and keeps them together. Strokes them at the same time, Tye’s hips heaving with each rep. Tye’s fingers grippin’ bruises into Jame’s thighs. 

They spark together, soft grunts and gasps blending together until Jame ain’t sure which noises are Tye’s and which are his own. 

Jame collapses down on Tye’s chest. Body still twitching with shock. Tye makes a labored wheeze of a breath but his arms are strong around Jame, keeping him close despite the weight of him on Tye’s lungs. 

They don’t go back to camp. Fall asleep in each other’s arms, the edge of the bedding and Jame’s shirt pulled over their naked bodies to ward off the night’s chill. 

Jame wakes early, restless. Spending two nights in camp feels strange after so long on the pass. Despite the joys to be found here, it leaves him twitchy, like something is going wrong beyond his perceptions, something he needs to go to. Needs to fix.

He slips out of the nest with Tye. Pulls the leathers over a bare leg sticking out and makes sure Tye has what he’ll need to walk back to their patch alone. He goes and greets the people working the cook-fire for first meal and helps for a while. 

Eloc is up before most and he and Jame eat together and then Jame takes him up the hills like he did Tye. There’s no beard on the boy’s chin, but Jame cuts his hair. He doesn’t have to tell Eloc what it means.

“You’re takin’ Tye, aren’t you.” Eloc says in the early morning quiet. “When can I go? How long…”

Jame sighs. Wants to say a long time. Wants to say when Eloc is full grown into a man’s strength. 

“Mebbe in the next hundred days,” he says instead. “Need to get you stronger on the bike. Even if you’re not ready to fight, we can use your eyes on watch. Use another moving body to make us look strong. Next time there’s a paying fare in the pass, I’ll have Lenora bring you with the outriders.”

Eloc nods and Jame wipes off the last of the goo he’d used for the shave. Stands in the quiet with a boy who might be his brother’s son. If Jame had him on the pass, a time might come when he’d have to give an order, knowing it might get the boy killed.

“For now I need you here. In case another Spiker gets through us. There will be a fighter from the pass here most times but you need to watch. Get help if there’s trouble.”

Eloc nods. Taking it like Jame means it. A real job, not some keep-busy to give a kid something to do out of grownups way.

They go down. Tye is in camp, heading back from first meal. 

“Hey,” Jame says, diverts from his course to walk back to their patch with Tyler.

“Lenora says a moving day’s coming. Need to get what we’re not taking to the pass stowed an’ the rest bagged up.” He takes a breath. Doesn’t see no better time coming to say what he needs to. “I’m headin’ back west after mid-meal. Kell’s running supplies out to the east end and he can show you the way. Carry whatever you can’t in the side car.”

Tye blinks, his face as much a mask as the front of Jame’s helmet. He nods, once. “Copy,” he says. No protest. No asking why. 

“Raig says he’ll watch out for you. Make sure you get settled in good.”

Tye nods again. “Yeah. Met mosta the folk from that end already. Seem solid.”

Jame starts sorting their things. Stuff that needs to be moved, other that Tye will want on the pass. The batch of kids comes up, Tye’s helmet held by the biggest. It’s mighty fine, strips and patches of leather covering the dome of it. Strings and tangles. Little trinkets tied on—bullet casings and a shiny crystal. 

Tye grins, steps over to meet them. “This for me?” he asks, like he knows what it means to them. A small piece of home. Something to remind him what he’s fighting for. Who. 

He turns it over in his hands, touching the decorations as the kids pipe up “That was me! I put that on there!” and “I did the braids. All by myself,” and “We put gears on it ‘cause you like gears.”

“It’s shine,” Tye says, even though just about nothing on it will reflect the light. Nothing on it is like the skull-boy cars, chromed up so much they looked like a second sun rising out of the wall of dust their wheels churned up. He touches them, pats on shoulders and ruffling hair. Lets them that wants to hug him do so. 

Kell comes up when the kids have scattered again. 

“I can leave east whenever you’re ready,” he says to Tye. 

Jame thought. Thought they’d have a little while longer. 

“Yeah, I’m good,” Tye says. Points to the pack they’ve made up for him. Spare legs and bedding. Bike parts he might need. 

Tye gives Jame a nod, a hint of a smile, and then he heads to his bike.


	22. Chapter 22

Tye slots into the eastern watch like he was meant to be on the pass. Stows his gear and gets shown around.

He likes the riders, seven of them now, counting Tye and Raig. 

Iring and Kip take him onto their work-shift. Share their lean-to with him when the wind blows sand over them at night. Ask Tye for stories of the pups back at camp. How they’re growin’, these kids that might be of their seed, these kids they ain’t seen but a time or two in a hundred days. 

Raig is fair as any Imperator Tye’s ever served under. Gives him orders the first day to follow Nianne’s rules on how long he can wear the leg, how long he can ride and how much he has to rest after. Gives him a list a jobs to do when he’s sittin’ and tells Tye it’s on him to know when to come in unless there’s outsiders in the pass. After that, he gives Tye work to do the same as the rest. Trusts Tye to say if he’s not solid. 

Tye rides every day. With Iring and Kip, or Leck, or Raig himself. Learns the ramps and flats, every inch of their end of the pass. He keeps gettin’ stronger, both on his bike and usin’ the legs Jor made for him. Sturdy without a pole to balance with. Feels taller than he has since the crash. 

The first time the watcher whistles that there’s vehicles incoming, Raig sends Tye up to the top of the ridge where he can see and be seen but won’t be the first one to start trouble or be in trouble if somethin’ goes sideways. He watches as two flares go up, four of the bikes go down. Swing circles around the three light trucks. Raig stops by the driver’s door and they look to be talkin’. Driver signs to one a their people and a small person goes around to the back a the truck. Pulls off a can and sets it on the ground, backs away again.

Raig rides up and lifts it onto the body of his bike. Unscrews the cap and checks it. Nods and the bikes spread out more, leavin’ room for the trucks to go by. 

They ride escort to where the cut crosses the pass, and Lenora, Kell and some a the other non-fighters join the show, bikes along the ledges like they got more people livin’ than they do. 

Raig’s people turn back to the pass, in case another band’s got the idea to try sneakin’ past. 

That night, Raig and a couple of the others sit down with Tye by the fire. Talk with him how it’s done. If it’s a safe-lookin’ number, they go down, circle around, show force. If it looks like the outsiders have the advantage of numbers or armor or weapons, the Keepers keep high. Up where their leathers blend with the rocks, where it’s easier to strike down than to strike up. 

Raig tells him of settin’ the prices. Guessin’ what folk can afford. How to get the most without needin’ to back down too far, to look too soft. 

Raig is big like Jame, solid and competent. It strikes Tye, sittin’ by that fire, how little he wants to rut with Raig. That even if he was sure Raig would say yes, he’d never go to Raig in the shroud. Not while Jame breathes. 

Tye takes himself off that night, when the talkin’s done, sits on the highest rock he can get to in the dark and faces west. Opens his trousers and puts his hand inside and wonders if Jame is scratchin’ that itch too. Wonders if Jame thinks a him when he does it. 

He catches the thick give of his pleasure in his hand and licks it off. Remembers Jame’s mouth on his fingers.

He goes back to camp and slips into the shelter next to Iring. The wind is startin’ to kick up, a storm threatenin’ on the horizon. 

It’s four days after the storm that the next caravan comes through. Six vehicles. Trucks, a van, couple a cars, all armed and armored. Raig signs his people to the high ledges. Waves Tye over to him. 

The trucks stop, and a lean person steps out, draped with cloths, hands up. 

“We seek passage,” they say. She says, Tye thinks. 

“What’ll you trade?” Raig calls back down. Two Keepers slip off to lay the spiked chain a klic down the pass. Just in case.

“We’ve got food. Water,” the spokeswoman says. 

Raig grumbles. “Gotta take it or they’ll know we don’t need it,” he mutters behind his helmet’s visor. 

“What else?” he yells down. “What’re ya bringin’ to trade?”

The woman looks into the truck, looks back. 

“Give ya four arm-lengths of fabric. New-woven, clean.” 

“Leave it,” Raig orders. “Drive on slow.”

The people in the trucks shuffle around, unpack their offerings and leave them on the road. They drive off, faster than Tye could walk, but slow enough that most a the Keepers could keep up on foot. When they get far enough along Raig signs Tye to go down with them and they check the haul. Tank of water, twenty gallons or so. Half that again in food. Hard cooked disks and strips of dried meat. A folded up square of cloth, smooth and even.

Raig nods to Tye. Shoots two flares up. The folk down the way will get the chain gone before the trucks get there and the caravan will never know it was a threat. Raig leaves Tye watchin’ and moves the prizes out of sight, and then they head up the ramps to join the rest, to watch and be sure the trucks are what they say.

They eat well that night. Tye won’t say it’s better than what he’s had in camp or back at the Citadel, but it is different and that makes it good.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I had to add another warning for this chapter--it's at the end of the fic, marked with *** . If you like warnings more than you hate spoilers, maybe take a glance)

Tye’s on watch when the car comes, well after mid-day. A tiny speck of dust across the sands. He whistles the warning and watches it coming closer. Closer but barely bigger. A single small car, no roof, two people inside. 

He rides down to run circles while Raig puts the scare into them. It feels off. Like a trap, but there’s nothin’ between them and the horizon. 

The driver is a man, the kind of old where the wear of bad days on him have left more of a mark than the number of days he’s been breathin. Wrinkled and lean. Grinnin’ around broken teeth like he’s glad to see them. Like they should be glad to see him.

The passenger is a girl-pup, small and thin, her shoulder bones pointy against her skin. Probably less than a thousand days older than Eloc, Tye’d reckon. She’s turned sideways facing the driver, her head tipped to rest on the seat, her eyes vacant. There’s a babe in her arms, an’ Tye has no ideas how many days it has. Small though. Newly minted. It’s tucked in under her shirt, nursin’, and he feels twisted up at the sight. He thought. He always thought breeders and warrin’ folk hit their purpose the same ages. That breeders made pups, they weren’t pups themselves. There’s girl-pups the size a this one in the kids that made his helmet an’ he knows there ain’t nobody that small walkin’ in the shroud. 

It ain’t right. 

The driver stands up in his seat, tryin’ to make himself look bigger. 

“Rock Riders! I have for you today a bargain!” he makes a sweeping gesture with is arms, makin’ a show of it.

“Out with it!” Raig snaps, and Tye thinks he don’t like the sight a this neither.

“You let us through the pass,” the man says, “And when I come back, I bring enough bounty for four crossings. Double your reward and no risk involved.”

“No,” Raig says. “You pay or you go back.”

The driver’s smile turns ugly. “I ain’t got the guzz to go back an’ come again. I been workin’ a hundred days and barely got the scratch together t’ get this far.”

Raig waits. This man’s troubles are not their concern.

“I ain’t got spare guzz. We got just enough food and water to get there breathin’. The hell you want from me?”

Raig nods at the infant. “We’ll take that.”

The man snarls. “Whatcha want that for? No use to you. I need him. To show she’s proven. She’s gonna be a wife to Immortan Joe. Proven breeder with a healthy brat. Gonna make me rich.”

“Then go around the mountains,” Raig decides. “You won’t get through here for free.”

The Immortan is dead and gone, but Tye figures Raig wouldn’t take it on credit anyway. 

The man hesitates, nerves showing in every motion. “How ‘bout. How ‘bout you take a turn with her. Don’t mark her up, but yeah.”

The girl don’t flinch, don’t seem to care she’s bein’ spoken of. 

Raig reaches down and puts hand on the gun at his hip. Makin’ his thoughts clear.

“Wait!” the man begs. “You can have it. Damn you, you can have the baby. The feck you want it fer?”

Raig rides close, holds out his hand. Riders circle around, like carrion birds on the smell of corpse. 

The man reaches down and grabs the babe. Picks it up in it’s blanket like a sling and near tosses it to Raig. Raig catches it easy one-handed, the other steerin’ the bike.

The girl though. The girl comes alive like guzz to a spark. “No!” she screams. “He’s mine! He’s mine! You can’t have him!” She claws at the man, tryin’ to get past him to get at Raig. He backhands her back down into the seat and Tye sees her gatherin’ her fight again, teeth bared. 

Tye’s closest. Feels the urge to act risin’ in his chest fit to smother him. 

Actin’ without orders was a habit that got kicked outta him a long time ago.

He comes up on her side a the car anyway and offers his hand. 

She goes still as the stars. Breathin’ hard. Tye could grab onto her. Snatch her off the car and drag her away from the man. He waits an’ it seems like forever but musta been quicker’n that. The man yells, callin’ her names Tye’d never heard before. Reaches out for her and she moves. Steps onto the top of the car’s door and takes Tye’s hand.

“Pipes are hot,” he warns her. “Up. You gotta get up on my back.”

She steps from the car door to the frame of his bike. Wraps her skinny arms around his neck over the shoulder pads and her knees around his hips. He leans forward on the bike, flat back makin’ it easier for her to stay up. The weight a her pushes him down, the tinker-made leg hurtin’ him more than it has since the first days he had it. 

“Hey!” Raig yells and Tye looks. To see if Raig’s tellin’ him to put her back. He’s pointin’ the gun at the man though. Gives Tye a nod to take off up the ramps towards camp.

It hurts but he rides. Dodges out of the way as the man reaches for her. He hears another bike at his back. Glances back and Raig is following. He can’t see what’s happenin’ at the car for the dust. Can’t hear for the roar of the bikes. He gets up the track, leg achin’. Swings the girl down off a his back and follows her down, landin’ on his side, bike fallin’ with a crunch but it’s made to not crush him when it does. He slithers out from under it and pushes back. 

Raig stops his own bike with more grace. Pulls his helmet off. The girl hovers, hands movin’ like she wants to snatch her sprog from Raig but can’t find the nerve. 

He passes it over before she has to get the courage to take from him. She wraps it in her arms and pulls back.

Raig lets her. Comes over to Tye and puts his bike up. Tye starts unbucklin’ his leg. Needs to get the pressure off for a bit. Let it breathe.

They can hear bikes below them. A sharp yell in the distance, and then all but one a the riders is comin’ back up. No escort takin’ the man through the pass. No flares goin’ up to let Jame’s group know what’s comin’. 

He waits, for Raig to snap him for doin’ without bein’ told, but he doesn’t. Raig raises an eyebrow in question and Tye shrugs. 

The girl sits on a rock by their camp circle. Holds the babe close and sways, her eyes gone distant again. 

Iring is the first to get to camp. Just about dumps his bike in the hurry to get over. Sheds helmet and flops down at the girl’s feet, smilin’ up at the little one. Reaches up to touch the tiny fist that waves around. 

The girl’s jaw works. She licks her lips. “Am I. Am I gonna be wife to all a you or one?” she asks. Looks from Raig to Tye an’ back again.

Raig growls and she flinches. 

“You’re not a wife,” he says. “Not here.”

Kip comes up next, gives Raig a nod.

“Car down there’s yours,” Raig says. “You wanna go back where you came from, nobody’s stoppin’ you. You wanna go west, you can do that too, but there’s wild men in the waste. Prolly end up worse than you started if you go that way. If you get through, there’s no tellin’ what you’ll find at the Citadel.”

She nods, weighing her options. 

Raig crouches down to her level. “You stay here, an’ no man’ll touch you any way you say no to. There’ll be food and water and shade.” 

She looks down to where Iring is makin’ faces at the sprout.

“Nobody’s eatin’ my baby?” she asks. 

Raig looks angry. Shakes his head. “No. I swear it.”

“Then. I’ll stay,” she says, like she’s not makin’ much of a choice at all. 

“What’s your name?” Raig asks, and Tye never woulda thought him to be a man who could ask anything gentle.

“He…he called me Mika.”

Raig sighs and stands up. Looks out to the sky.

“Gettin’ late to send a runner to camp an’ have Lenora bring the side car out here, get her back to camp before dark,” he says. “We’ll getcha comfortable here for the night.”

Mika nods, eyes down and hunched in on herself. 

“Iring, leave the sprog be,” Raig says, but he don’t sound hot about it. 

Iring grumbles and goes to make space in their lean-to for her, proppin’ up a slip of bedding leather for him and Kip and Tye for the night. The wind ain’t kickin’ up so it should be okay.

Raig starts a pot of dinner and the other three go up to the watch-point to give her less folk to worry about. 

They eat, and Mika takes the bowl Tye passes to her. After, she goes to the spot they made for her even though nobody else is ready for sleep. It’s no privacy, but they give her what space they can. Sit not-facin’ her. 

Raig settles next to Tye by the embers of the fire. 

“Why?” he asks and Tye don’t have to question what he’s talkin’ about.

He thinks a long time. Shrugs a little. 

“She wasn’t his to sell,” Tye finally settles on. 

Raig nudges him, lookin’ for more but Tye isn’t sure he has the words Raig is lookin’ for. 

“I didn’t steal her,” Tye says. Sounds like he’s defending himself but that’s not the way he meant it. “The man. He wanted to go through the pass. She didn’t. Just made it easier for her to do what she wanted to when it didn’t cost us anything.”

Raig nods. Smiles a little in the light of the embers. 

=================

Tye’s dream tastes of paint and guzz, feels like the wind and sand in his face. He’s running behind a chromed up beaut of a car. Wrists tied, pulled at the very top speed he can make on foot. Runnin’ like the ferals he hunted outta the wastes back when he followed Joe. He struggles. Gasps for air. He’ll be dragged if he falls. Warboys whoop and jeer at him. His steps feel solid, both of them, and he looks down. Sees two boots. Like the thinkin’ of a problem makes it happen he takes another stride and there’s no foot there. Nothin’ but the dangle of his trouser leg and he goes down hard. Wind knocked outta his chest. 

The gravel cuts him as he’s dragged. Dust fills his lungs. 

Tye sits up into the quiet of the night. Takes three big breaths just to prove to himself that he can. Iring grumbles and bumps into Kip. Kip pops his head up, eyes wide but they fall closed again when there’s no threat and he flops back into his spot. 

Tye’s foot aches in the dark and he rubs the scar with both hands. Hard. Tryin’ to tell his body that it ain’t there no more. 

He’s still tastin’ the fumes and grit of the dream so he scoots over to the little firepit where the water sack is, usin’ his hands and his other foot and hop-crawlin’ over. 

He doesn’t see Mika until he’s near close enough to touch her. Sittin’ so still there like she’s part a the landscape. 

He turns a little to go around and gets to the waterskin. Unties it and takes a long drink. He offers it to her when he’s done but she shakes her head. Takes a shuddering breath like the night’s been unsteady for her too. 

Tye clears his throat. Licks his lips. She ain’t his, but she feels like his responsibility. 

“It. It ain’t easy, bein’ new-took,” he says, remembering Re-Tom’s words from so long ago. “I came from the Citadel. Came from where there’s nobody a person could trust. Crew, but they’re only crew as long as you can do war. As long as they don’t want your place on the lancer’s perch.” 

He isn’t sure if she’s listening at all.

“I was wrecked when I came. Lost my leg an’ lost the man I been followin’ all my life. Weren’t much left a me. Whole bunch a hate and fear. Took me a while but I stopped fightin’ long enough to listen. Jame. You ain’t met him yet. He showed me a better road to ride.”

He takes a deep breath. “It’s better here. Better’n whatever’s happenin’ at the Citadel now. Better’n any place I heard of.”

She’s still quiet so he takes another sip of water, ties the container back closed and crawls back to where he came from. He doesn’t know if he did any good or if he just got in her space for nothin’. 

In the mornin’, Raig goes to camp. Lenora comes near mid-day with the big bike and the side-car. Drops off the resupply for the east end of the pass. She walks up the ramp while the Keepers go down to unload the food and water. 

Mika looks up as Lenora walks to her. 

“They take good care a you out here?” Lenora asks, tipping Mika’s face to see better the place where the man hit her. 

“Yeah,” Mika says. Looks over to Tye. “They been real nice.”

“Okay, let’s getcha to camp,” Lenora says. Helps Mika to her feet and puts a gentle hand on her back. 

Raig comes back after last-meal, Eloc on his small-size bike with him. 

“At first light, you go west,” he tells Tye. 

His heart makes a jump. West. He’s goin’ west. To Jame.


	24. Chapter 24

Jame and Jor spend the three days after Tye comes west showin’ him the more complicated trails of the west end of the pass. They get hit more often from this side, Citadel and Spikers and sometimes a band of hairy wild men, and if somethin’ hard to stop comes from the east, Raig and his can draw the attackers here, where the pass is narrower and higher and the best place for the kill. He shows Tye the changes they’ve made since the Spiker got past. Jame has Tye run it, with him or Jor or by himself under their eye, until Tye knows every inch of it, until Jor petitions Jame for mercy on Tye’s behalf. Warns him about exhaustion a worse weakness than newness to the tracks. 

Tye sleeps in their patch, same as he did in camp. Two days beside Jame and one on Jor’s side, no sign of a reason for who or when. 

On the fourth day, Tye takes his first turn on watch, learnin’ from the reinforcment that came from camp what he’s lookin’ at on this side of the pass. The shape of him silhouettes like another rock against the sky, sittin’ next to the angles of his bike. Jame goes up the track the opposite way, him and Jor undoing the wear the three of them done on the ramps in the days past. 

Half a dozen times, Jame takes a breath. Sore tempted to find a way to ask how Jor and Neet got to a place where they’d meet without the shroud. To ask if Jor thinks Tye would like to. If Jame should offer.

He’s sore tempted, but knows the answers already. Can’t imagine Jor askin’ without Neet makin’ the offer first. Knows that if Tye wants, Tye will ask. He’s been bold enough showin’ his opinions on Jame before. Just because Tye took the shroud off once, don’t mean Jame can go expectin’ anything of him. 

So he keeps quiet. Does the hard dusty work of shoveling and packing dirt and rock into the grooves they’ve worn. Jor keeps givin’ him looks, but he doesn’t push. Now, when Jame would welcome a question, a way to start askin’ the things he shouldn’t ask, Jor doesn’t push. 

Jame is hot and sweaty when him and Jor come in for mid-meal, strippin’ off helmets and sittin’ in the shade of their lean-to. Tye leaves Wint and comes down the hill. Grabs his bowl and gets as much of himself out of the sun as he can, sittin’ a little lower than Jame, close in, all in Jame’s space so he has to prop an elbow on Tye’s shoulder-pads just to get at his own food.

Four days. It’s by far the most time Jame and Tye have spent together in a row. Almost as much as all the times they’ve been in camp at the same time put together. Sitting with his arm on Tye’s shoulder, Tye’s ribs against the outside of Jame’s knee, it strikes him that he likes the man Tye is becoming. All his fierce anger has shifted to fierce passion. For riding, for work, for tellin’ stories of the kids in camp.

Tye finishes his meal but doesn’t lean away from Jame. He turns, shoulders against Jame’s thigh now. Tips his head back in Jame’s lap, almost into Jame’s bowl. Jame makes a wordless grump of protest and Jor snorts, thumps Jame’s shoulder and then leaves them alone. 

Tye watches him, near upside down and smiling. The tilt of his head bares his throat, smooth and damp with sweat, the line where paint picks up where the shade of his helmet would break off. Jame wants to touch the skin showing between his pads and straps. Wants to taste. He can’t. Won’t.

“What’re you doin’?” he asks, and can’t stop himself from running his fingers through Tye’s tangled hair. Gettin’ long. Like he’s been here forever.

Tye moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue and Jame can’t help what that does to his heart rate. 

“I was askin’ Jor, why you didn’t come for me since I’ve been west.” There’s a tease to his voice. Not cruel. Like he’s as much mocking himself as he is Jame. 

“He said you wouldn’t be the one. Bein’ war-leader an’ all.”

Jame shrugs. “Wouldn’t be right. Askin’ from power.”

Tye hmms and stretches, even more into Jame’s space. Jame puts his bowl down before he loses it. 

“Well, this is me askin’,” Tye says. “If the answer’s yes, call me over after sundown and we’ll go off and find us a place.”

Jame’s lips twitch as he tries not to smile, tries not to whoop in joy and relief. The flutter in his stomach is more than the prospect of gettin’ his stick stroked. That Tye wants to do it. Wants it as much as Jame does. Makes him all warm inside. 

“It’ll be yes,” Jame says. Combs his fingers through Tye’s hair one last time. “C’mon, time to get up and get some…”

The whistle of warning from the watch echoes off the rocks. Tye jumps up off Jame’s lap and keeps up as Jame heads to the high perch to see.

Three vehicles. Truck and two vans. Still far enough out for the Keepers to prepare for them. Riders grab helmets and scramble for their bikes. 

Jame gets geared up and gives the signal to go down to meet them.

Tye is the first one on the ramp, the braids the kids put on his helmet bouncing behind him. The contrast between his dark armored padding and the painted-white of his skin is bold, as much a distinctive show as Ria’s ostrich quill ruff. 

Jame follows him down. Hopes for an easy haggle and a quick passage.


	25. Chapter 25

Tye hits the ramp down, leading the pack and making the first circle around the vehicles as they slow and enter the narrow of the pass. He feels good. Right in this place and this task. Knows what’s expected of him. How to do it. 

Jame is last down, timing the loops of riders flowing around the caravan so he crosses their line with nobody slowing at all. He comes up slow to the passenger window of the lead van. Makes them wait before he’s close enough to negotiate with.

Tye glances back at Jame over his shoulder. He is too good on the bike to falter, but the sudden realization that he _knows_ these vehicles rattles him and he slows to a crawl. The convoy is shorter than it had been when they traded Raig food, water and cloth for passage, but Tye remembers the markings on the van. It’s not improbable for a group to lose members. To enemies or branching off on their own or staying in the new place. There’s scoring on the vehicles that hadn’t been there before. Deep gouges and punctures.

The van’s side windows have long-ago been replaced by a steel plate with a broad slit across it. Tye looks in and the sun is with him, gives him a clear snap look at the men inside as he goes by, the point of a harpoon just beyond the van’s armor. Tye’s face is hidden by his helmet but he sees the passenger, the _raider_ widen his eyes and pivot the point of the weapon.

“Jame!” Tye yells, “Buzzards!” 

The harpoon fires at Tye’s chest and he throws his weight back to get himself out of it’s path, twisting and bringing the bike down on himself. The harpoon glances off of his helmet as he falls and then the back of his helmet smacks against the gravel and rock below him. The sharp crack of gunfire echoes through the canyon.

Bullets hit the underside of his bike, the impacts reverberating through the metal and against his thighs. A harsh thud shocks up the padded cup and braces and straps of Tye’s right leg, like someone just kicked him and it takes a second to realize that he’s been shot. The fecking schlangers shot his fecking leg. He tries to shelter behind the bulk of his bike but he can’t get the knee to fold and the roar of engines takes the battle away from him before it matters.

A single flare goes up. Warning Raig that enemies are coming. Enemies are in the pass.

Jame. Jor. Everybody. Danger. _War._ Tye wriggles his left leg out from under his bike and pushes it upright with the strength of his thigh. The other won’t hold weight but the hooks on the front to go over the riding pegs are still in place. He crosses the bad leg over the frame of the bike and kick-starts it with his left. He’s gotta get back in the fight, the aching fear of missing the chance at war almost lost in his fear for people he knows, for Jame. 

The motor catches and he turns to follow the battle. Up the ramps on the south side of the pass. He grabs a bomb out of the pouch on his bike, feels its weight in his hand, the potential destruction just begging for something to break.

He catches up to the fight. Bikes are jumping over the vehicles. The last one is burning, the canvas coverings on fire from the bombs. Tye picks his ramp and goes up. Gets a sight on a gap that the Buzzards are shootin’ out of and throws. He hits the armor, but close enough. Close enough that he sees the flames suck into the hole with the wind of their passage. The truck swerves but doesn’t stop. He catches sight of Jame ahead, on the flat of the pass. Gun in his hand, twisting and firing backwards at the windshield. 

Jame takes the next ramp up and Tye gets another bomb ready. 

The lead van hits the tire-ripper chain fast enough, hard enough that the vehicle jerks to the side, topples and rolls twice. The chain is broken though, pieces scattered.

The second vehicle plows through, slams the van out of their way and keeps going. Jor flies over it, drops a bomb onto the roof. The shell bursts with the explosion, flames filling the gap between the cab and the bundled cargo. 

He doesn’t know where the third one went. It was on fire and then it was so far behind them as to not matter. 

Ahead, he sees the opening, the moves all falling into place in his head. Hits the soft ramp and flows over the other side, gunning for speed as he comes down, hoping to the sky that his pads hold as he lays it down, slides five bike-lengths and into a place where he can throw upwards, can get the sweet underside of the back axle with the bomb, the fragile shell of the gas tank.

The vehicle shoots flames in every direction and the whoomp of it knocks the wind out of him, sends his ears ringing. He does a check of himself and doesn’t think he’s wrecked. Picks the bike up again and meets the other Keepers coming in to join him. Five where there were nine of them that went into the fight. 

Jame signs Jor and Re-Tom and Luc to watch the fire and Tye to come on with him. Jame goes first to a spot where they’d stored a goat-skin bag of guzz and then they go back to the flipped van, where Ria and Donno stand watch. Jame rides up, slips the narrow neck of the skin into the window-slits and empties it into the vehicle. He rides away and Tye tosses the bomb, watches it go up like the one he took down. 

The last truck is already burning, Rad and Roc watching to make sure nobody comes out of it. 

Someone stands guard each of the vehicles burn until there’s nothing left to feed the fires, and then they go back up to their small camp. Wint says the horizon and everything between them and it are empty of movement. No dust plumes, no specks of life. The ‘all clear’ flares go up. 

Jor lays his bike down and limps over to their patch. Stretches out to ease a sore muscle. Hip or back, Tye thinks. 

Jame puts eyes on everybody like he’s checking for blood. “Clean up, get some rest. We’ll cut apart the fight later, but I couldn’t have asked for better.”

Tye sits on the frame of his bike and wishes it had a seat. The end of his leg is aching, worse with every beat of his heart, as the rush of the fight fades and the damage done starts to sink in. He has the maddening feeling that he needs to pop his ankle and all of his toes but he don’t have any of that to pop. He tries to flex the foot but it only moves his aching scar in the cup of the damaged leg. 

Jame dumps his helmet, gets the skin of water. Offers it to Tye when he’s done. A little frown appears between Jame’s eyebrows. His eyes narrow when Tye doesn’t take the skin.

“Little help?” Tye asks, tryin’ not to catch anybody else’s attention. He can’t get the bike’s kickstand down with only one leg to lean on. He could maybe control a fall, but he’s sore enough that the idea has little appeal. 

Jame is at his side in a blink. Grabs the front between the grips and kicks the stand down for Tye. Rolls the bike the half-wheel-turn back to prop it up. His strong arm goes around Tye and he lifts him up and off the bike. 

“Where you hurt?” Jame asks. “Can you walk?” 

Tye shakes his head. “Just need help gettin’ to where I can sit. They shot my fecking leg.”

Jame puts him ass-first onto a big rock. Starts patting him down looking for the injury. “Let me do what I can an’ then we’ll getcha to Nianne,” he says and Tye reaches down, grabs both his hands and stops him.

“ _I_ ain’t shot. Just the leg. I need Re-Tom or Jor more’n I need Nianne.”

He starts fumbling with the straps. Jame distracts him for a tic by leaning in, pressing their faces together. Dirty and damp with sweat. Tye puts off the comfort of havin’ the leg off for the good-feeling of being so close to Jame. 

When Jame is recovered from fearing Tye shot, he brushes Tye’s shaky hands off and works the buckles. Tye gasps as the cup comes off the end of his leg. It prickles and aches all the way to his toes. If he could just wiggle them. Take some a the pressure off…

Jame kneels on the ground in front of him and takes the bad leg in his hands. Rolls the shortened trouser leg up far enough to see. His hands are gentle. His dark eyes serious. 

“How’s it look?” Tye asks. 

Jame’s hand cups around above Tye’s knee, pushes into the tight muscles there. All around them, the camp is full of Keepers. Eating and drinking. Refilling their bomb-bags and topping off the fuel tanks. Tye’s just got eyes for Jame though. Jame looking at the most-wrecked parts of him. 

“You’re bruised,” Jame says. “I don’t know how to tell anything more than that. I’d reckon Nianne’d say for you to keep the leg off a while.”

Tye nods. Figures he’s some use out here still. Eyes still work. 

“I’ll get Jor and Re-Tom workin’ on it,” Jame promises. “’Bout the time they get it fixed you should be good to ride again, eh?”

“Yeah,” Tye says. Grateful that Jame is keeping him. That Jame sees the value in him. 

Jame stands and takes the leg over to Re-Tom. Seeing somebody else handling it like that is like Tye’s body coming apart and he can’t feel it at all. No hurt, but. Disorienting. 

Jame comes back and offers Tye his hand. “Lets getcha outta the sun,” he says. Gives Tye his shoulder as a crutch and the two of them walk over to the lean-to with Jor. 

Tye groans as he’s laid down and Jame pats his hip. Steps back to go off to more work getting ready for the next threat to try punching down their throats. 

Jor reaches over and scratches his fingers through Tye’s hair. 

“You did good,” he says, and Tye reckons he did. If he can just figure a way to not get wrecked next time he’ll do better.


	26. Chapter 26

Jame intends days of rest for Tye. Necessary healing and reward for his beautiful ride and for coming back alive from it all. 

He thinks he’ll tell Jor to put the repairs on the leg in low-gear. Not stalling, just to make sure Tye’ll take the time he’s given. 

He imagines days bringing his work up to the camp. Running repairs on the chain with Tye in the day, helping him off to a quiet spot at night. 

They get the rest of the day. A night where Tye keeps waking up gasping, grabbing his leg in pain until Jame switches around to lie at his feet, Tye’s leg in his hands, there to soothe him back down when the pain’s too much. They get the morning meal and jobs assigned for the day. Then Wint whistles the alarm and Jame and Jor and everybody who can scramble goes up to the watch to see a wide V of vehicles pointed towards the pass and coming closer. 

Tye is putting his walking leg on when Jame gets back to the camp, and he’d like to tell him no. Keep him safe when he’s already hurting. He can’t afford to. Can’t let his worries as a man override his sense as war leader. 

There’s a chance, that this is a peaceful crossing. Folk doing business and able to ken that paying to pass is cheaper’n fighting for it. 

“We’re gonna run this on the safe-side,” Jame says as his people get geared up. “We can hope it’s traders but keep distant even if we’ve got the numbers. Look out for any tell. Any sign they ain’t what they look like. If they get to the last narrow, there’s a new rock-fall stacked up to knock over. Whoever’s still up, you get those rocks down.” He doesn’t have to say that most a their new defenses are in bits. Their numbers thinner’n any of them would like. 

“Wint, if I give you sign, throw up the flare and then beat for camp.” 

Jor pulls Tye to his feet and tosses him his helmet once Tye’s on the bike, his leg locked over the posts. Jame knows it’s not as good for ridin’. Dangerous to put down for a pivot or if the ground gets rough enough that he needs to push the bike over a rock. Tye’s pale as he pulls his helmet on, face pinched.

Jame gives the signal and they ride out to the fallen arch, to the first place the pass crumples in tight enough to lay ambush. The oncoming vehicles are there by the time the bikes’ dust has settled. The five-wide V of them narrows to a straight line. Three of the cars stop outside of the narrow. Two come into the kill zone—a small tanker truck and a chromed-up stacked-up car thing. There’s no question where they’re from, the Citadel’s flamin’ circle on each one of them, skulls pried off and some kinda X put on, the cross point well high of center. 

Jame throws up his hand and the riders hold position. Engines rev. He’s a heartbeat from givin’ the go when the door of the lead truck opens. Two hands show, one flesh and one like Tye’s leg, dull metal buckled to a harness of straps.

Furiosa.

Jame’s mouth tastes sour and he almost gives the attack signal anyway. Last time they had a contract with her they lost half their fighters. They can’t possibly win, battered as they are, few as they are. If the other three Citadel vehicles have skullboys, armor, they’ll tear through the pass and slaughter everyone and little Jame can do about it. If he signals now, they can at least hope to avenge themselves on the designer of their doom.

He wasn’t voted War Leader for his hot head and he waits. Holds. 

Furiosa steps down from the truck. Hands near her head. 

“Rock Riders!” She calls and Jame revs his engine in reply.

“We had a bargain, two hundred days ago. Neither of us kept our word. Threat was made. Lives were lost.”

He revs again. 

“Gastown and the Bullet Farm have allied with the might of the Citadel. We are looking for peace on our eastern border. The return of trade. Prosperity for all.”

The Keepers wait.

“I offer restitution. There’s a thousand gallons of guzz. I offer it not in exchange for any prize but as an opening to negotiation. You check the octane. We’ll come back tomorrow. Talk terms.”

She keeps eye on Jame. Walks sideways to the car. A man is driving. The same man that drove the rig, Jame thinks. She pauses at the door, looking over the riders. Counting them. Her eyes pause on Tye. Her mouth flattens. 

Furiosa gets in the car and it backs slow out of the pass, leaving the fuel truck behind. 

Jame gives a _wait_ signal and watches until the dust of their passing settles. Jor gives a little tilt of his head. Volunteering to be the one to go down. 

Jame waits. The truck doesn’t explode. The car and the three escort vehicles go back to the sand. 

He signals Jor the go-ahead to go down. Jor circles the truck twice. Parks the bike and jumps up on the running board. Looks inside. Opens the door. Still no trick, no trap. Exhaust drifts from the muffler, the engine left running for them. 

Jame signals Jor to take it down the pass, down to where they’d planned to park the fuel pod last time. Signs Re-Tom to go pick him up and bring him back to his bike, and then once the two of them are back above the pass he signs everybody to head back to the west camp. 

He wants to throw his helmet. Wants to punch something. Instead he grits his teeth and helps Tye off his bike. Hangs his helmet off of the handlebars of his own. He nods Jor and Tye off to the side, a place that Tye can sit and they can talk without being the center of attention.

“They know,” he says, when the rest have settled by the fire, engines quiet and ticking out their heat. “Griss, asking for that much guzz instead of a mix of food and water and fuel. Me, sending the caravan to say we’re open to negotiation.” 

Tye and Jor listen. Eyes serious. 

“We stopped looking like hilltop bandits. They figured out we’re a people.”

Jor sighs. “Does it change anything?”

Jame rubs his lower lip with the rough leather of his glove. 

“They’re negotiating like they think it’s cheaper to talk than fight. That’s good.”

Tye nods. “No sense sendin that much guzz to a force they’re just gonna fight later. Could be less a them made it back than they’re saying. Could be they’re bluffing their numbers as much as we are.”

Jame takes a breath. “So we negotiate. Haggle but don’t push hard enough they start thinkin’ we’d be easier to take than buy.”

Jor and Tye both nod. 

“Let’s see if we can get the chain fixed before mornin’, just in case,” Jame says, and the day’s work begins.


	27. Chapter 27

They work half the night. Tye pounds the chain back together for Rad and Roc to run back to its place. Re-Tom goes up in the dark, moving the dressed-up wrecks and dried-out corpses that make them look stronger, figuring Furiosa woulda counted them. Noted their places. Jame sends Jor to the east, to bring back Raig and all his people, sends Donno to the main camp to tell Lenora what’s happening, to get the camp ready if an attack comes.

Jame lays out where he wants everybody the next day. Jor and Tye going down at either side of him. Enough strength to discourage another double-cross but taking as little out of the force on the hills as possible. The rest up on the ramps and ledges. Playing image as much as actual fighting plan. If they fight, they can’t win.

It’s late morning again when Wint whistles down the alert. They gear up and ride to the ledge above the pass. Tye’s leg aches but not as bad as the day before. Figures he’ll be able to fight on it at least. Be able to ride without going sick from the pain.

The vehicles come again. Three stay outside. One comes in. The passengers step out. Furiosa. Her driver. A soft-clothed woman with red hair braided back from her face.

They wait. The driver has a sawed-off shotgun down by his leg. Tye’s fingers itch for a bomb, but Jame gave clear orders. Not to attack without his sign.

Jame gives the  _go down_. Leads the way. Tye’s never been on a ramp goin’ so slow. Lazy. Like they got all day.

Jame approaches Furiosa. Stops three bike-lengths from her. “Negotiations are open. What do you want from us?”

Furiosa steps back and Tye braces for an attack but there isn’t one. The red-haired woman steps up. One a the wives then.

“I am Capable, of the council of the Green Place. We offer peace and cooperation. We have a list of requests, if you would hear them.”

Jame nods. Like he has the power to stop her.

“We want to scavenge the pass. There are vehicles that are no use to you that we need. We want you to continue to maintain and protect the trade route. We want to collect our dead and bring them home.”

“Terms?” Jame prompts.

The sister raises her chin, unintimidated. “Fifty gallons of guzz for every small vehicle we take. A hundred for a large one. Passage is between you and the caravans. The prices you take haven’t been enough to discourage trade yet. As long as the caravans still come, we leave that to you. If you get attacked by a superior force, you can send for help from the Citadel and we will come.”

“One hundred gallons for a small vehicle, two for a large,” Jame counters.

“Seventy-five and one-fifty,” she answers and he nods.

“No more than five of your people in the pass at a time. Any more and we treat it as an attack. You can salvage from the sand to the end of the wreck at the arch. Any further and we talk again.”

“We can send the first wrecker crew tomorrow.”

Jame nods again.

Her confidence falters for the first time. “There was a body. A WarBoy. He’d been driving the rig. Do you know where he ended up?”

Jame shakes his head. “All looked the same to me. There was a woman. Old. Dressed different. Could tell you where she’s laid.”

Capable puts her hand over her mouth. Nods like it wasn’t what she wanted to hear but she’ll take it as the truth.

“That all?” Jame asks and Tye is itchin’ to get back up the ramps.

Capable steps back and Furiosa comes forward. Points the metal of her hand in Tye’s direction.

“I swore I was done leavin’ ‘Boys in the sand,” she says, voice rough. “He comes with us or there’s no deal.”

Tye freezes like a lizard in a shadow. He knows his strength. Knows his place and his part. He knows, even with his added value to Jame, that he’s not worth scrapping a deal like this.

Jame revs his motor in warning.

“He’s not your boy,” Jame answers. “He’s not in the sand.”

Tye’s breath catches. That Jame would do something so stupid as to put Tye over all of their lives. Over all there is to lose.

Furiosa’s driver shifts his weight and it’s all gonna come apart in another beat or two. Tye can see the slide of it starting. His breath catches like the first day he rode with a helmet. War, and he wants no part of it. And if he’s the piece that’ll stop it, he can make the play.

He juices the throttle and skips his bike forward. Puts the thing they’re ready to war over where the fight would start. Keeps his hands firm on the bars, showing no threat. The driver’s gun comes up. Furiosa pulls her own. Capable steps back behind them both.

“Tye!” Jame snaps. Tye knows Jame and Jor on the other side of him are finding weapons but he can’t bear to look back. Can’t bear to look at Jame if this goes wrong.

He reaches up. Slow. Grabs onto his helmet and pulls it off. Knows what he looks like now, long hair and beard. Scars but no paint on his face. White paint and scars between the plates of his armor.

He meets Furiosa’s gaze like he wasn’t so far beneath her that there’d been days he’d a given his best wrench to have her step over him on her way to piss.

“I’ve not been a  WarBoy for a hundred days and more,” he says, chin up and defiant. Lets her see he’s not the one who was driving the rig. Not any a those she brushed off the rig to die in the storm. “I’m a man of the Pass and if you take me from here. From my home and my wheelmate, you’d best leave me in the sand because I’ll fight you to my last.”  

Color rises on his cheeks, to claim Jame in a place where there is no claim on another person. Where the shroud sees everyone free. It’s more than giving her words she’ll understand though. He feels every one of them the truth, no matter what Jame’s reply would be, he’ll live or die with these words. 

She stares him down for long moments, but he won’t look away. Won’t bend. He means it. Means to fight long as it takes to get back to Jame. To Eloc. To Lenora and Nianne and Jor and the people who made him theirs.

“What’s your name?” Furiosa asks him, her voice quieter.

“Tye,” he says, heart pounding.

She nods. “I’ll tell the others. That you stay of your own choice. That nobody’s to take you unless you call for it.”

Tye swallows hard and dips his head. “Copy,” he says, pushes off and gives the bike just enough  guzz to move him outta the way.

Jame gives him a  _go the feck to camp_  sign, angry and brusque and Tye goes. He’s not sure how ticked Jame will be. If he’ll punish Tye for this, for defying the War Leader and brokering his own not-sale. For rising above his station and speaking to an enemy leader.

============

Tye finally follows a fecking order and shoots up the ramps towards the west camp, and Jame waits until he’s clear before signing Jor to follow. Capable and the driver step back to the vehicle. The woman enters and the driver waits on Furiosa.

She can’t meet Jame’s gaze through the tint of his visor, but she makes a good approximation. A smile quirks at the corner of her mouth and he wonders if it’s all gonna fly to smoke.

“Take good care of him,” she says, like she knows he was the one Tye meant.

She turns her back on him, the space between her shoulder blades an easy target but he doesn’t take the shot.

The vehicle does a slow turn and heads back west, and Jame watches until there’s no chance of them coming back.

Then he turns. Finally lets himself feel. The terror when Tye rode between them. His heart beats faster the closer he gets. His wheels spin faster.

He drops the bike when he gets around that last bend. Rips his helmet off and tosses it aside. Shakes off his gloves. Jor is there, standing between Jame and Tye. Jame ducks around him, pushes past him when Jor tries to slow him down. Tye’s chin comes up, defiant as he’d been with Furiosa.

“Jame, it wasn’t…” Jor starts and then Jame crashes into Tye, chest to chest. Knocks him back a step and grabs on. Clings to him.

“You fecking fume-headed fool,” Jame says, but he can’t let go. Can’t make his arms loosen. Tye holds onto him, breath hitching and Jame’s name slipping from his lips.

Jame moves his hands up. Cups Tye’s face and presses their foreheads together hard enough to hurt. Not enough. Not nearly enough for the fear he’d felt. Mashes his lips to Tye’s and tastes him. Breathes his air.

“We’re good,” Tye says, strong. Alive. “We’re good.”

He’s too long hardened by protecting the pass to fall into trust, but he knows hope. Hope the Citadel keeps its promises. Hope that Tye’ll stay at his side until one a them’s too old or banged up to ride. Hope that they can keep the pass safe even as they crack open the gates and let more prosperity in.

“Yeah, Tye,” Jame gasps. “Yeah. We’re good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Suicidal character, fanaticism, amputation, violence,.
> 
> General Citadel ugliness (mentions of slavery, rape, none on-screen. 
> 
> ***There is a scene with a child who has been sexually abused and a brief on-screen instance of physical violence against that child)
> 
> War culture. 
> 
> Character is taken as "Salvage" in a vaguely slave-fic sort of way, but it evolves into more of a cultural assimilation pretty quickly.
> 
> There is a sex scene later that is consented to but the character is stressed and unhappy during but doesn't say so. 
> 
> Het sex.
> 
> Body horror.


End file.
